04-30-2017, 03:09 AM
Oort cloud... SY99... Planet 9...
Fascinating stuff. Then in my inbox this morning I received a "Greatest Hits" twitter post for an earlier discovery by the Mauna Kea observatories. This one involved the distant objects around Neptune named Trojans*, discovered in collaboration with the New Horizons spacecraft on it's way to Pluto a few years ago:
So, what kind of serendipitous discovery did we make? We found a Neptune Trojan, now called 2011 HM102! And it's not just any Neptune Trojan: it makes a list of superlatives. It's the largest trailing Trojan known in the entire Solar System, it's the most inclined Neptune Trojan known, and (as of right now) it is the closest known object of any kind to the New Horizons spacecraft!
So how are we managing to find our wily little specks? First off, we need a lot of light-collecting power, so we need some of the largest telescopes in the world. Second, we have a relatively large area of sky to search - roughly 8-10 times the size of the full moon - so we need big imagers.
That limits the facilities we can use to just a few; the 3.5 meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) with its huge MegaPrime imager, the twin 6.5 meter Magellan telescopes with their three large-format imagers (IMACS f/2, IMACS f/4, and MegaCam), and the enormous 8.2 meter Subaru telescope with its SuprimeCam imager.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blo...anion.html
See the article for more info, and nice graphic showing fields of view for the two Mauna Kea telescopes and Magellan in Chile noted above.
* Previous post by TomK about Trojans: http://www.punaweb.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=22533&whichpage=20&SearchTerms=trojans
Fascinating stuff. Then in my inbox this morning I received a "Greatest Hits" twitter post for an earlier discovery by the Mauna Kea observatories. This one involved the distant objects around Neptune named Trojans*, discovered in collaboration with the New Horizons spacecraft on it's way to Pluto a few years ago:
So, what kind of serendipitous discovery did we make? We found a Neptune Trojan, now called 2011 HM102! And it's not just any Neptune Trojan: it makes a list of superlatives. It's the largest trailing Trojan known in the entire Solar System, it's the most inclined Neptune Trojan known, and (as of right now) it is the closest known object of any kind to the New Horizons spacecraft!
So how are we managing to find our wily little specks? First off, we need a lot of light-collecting power, so we need some of the largest telescopes in the world. Second, we have a relatively large area of sky to search - roughly 8-10 times the size of the full moon - so we need big imagers.
That limits the facilities we can use to just a few; the 3.5 meter Canada-France-Hawaii telescope (CFHT) with its huge MegaPrime imager, the twin 6.5 meter Magellan telescopes with their three large-format imagers (IMACS f/2, IMACS f/4, and MegaCam), and the enormous 8.2 meter Subaru telescope with its SuprimeCam imager.
http://www.planetary.org/blogs/guest-blo...anion.html
See the article for more info, and nice graphic showing fields of view for the two Mauna Kea telescopes and Magellan in Chile noted above.
* Previous post by TomK about Trojans: http://www.punaweb.org/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=22533&whichpage=20&SearchTerms=trojans
“We do this thing not because it is easy, but because we thought it would be easy.”