Really stupid question about Pluto

Really stupid question about Pluto

Really stupid question about Pluto

(visit the link for the full news article)

Ok so i just had a quick question hopefully someone will care enough to answer it..

Ok so ive seen many pictures of other Galaxies, Nebulas and things of that nature but what i wonder is why can't we get a half decent photo of pluto??

We can see things millions of light years away. but inside of our solar system we can't see??


(visit the link for the full news article)

I think we have just never sent anything in the general direction of Pluto.

There is a mission that will fly by there in 2015 (1984 days to be exact), so we will get much more details then!

pluto.jhuapl.edu...

g

[edit on 6-2-2010 by grantbeed]

Galaxies are tens or hundreds of thousands of light years across, and they emit their own light.

Pluto has a diameter of 2274km and is so far from the sun that it can barely reflect any of that light back to us.

The New Horizons space probe will be at Pluto in a few years, something to watch.


[edit on 2/6/2010 by ZombieOctopus]

reply to post by ZombieOctopus


The post above sums it up as well as can be said. It's not that we haven't "looked" at the object. It's more the fact that it hardly reflects any light. There isn't much to see, no matter what you're looking with. It's an incredibly small body of matter (so to speak) with an incredibly small amount of light being able to reach it.

Have a friend hold up a grain of sand in the dark. Stand a few feet away and shine a flashlight toward the grain. See any detail? That's why.

Strype

Like ZombieOctopus pointed out, even with the best of our telescopes, we;'re basically looking at a pebble in a dark closet. No matter how much we work at it, it's going to keep on looking like a sad lump of blurry, until we're right next to it.

Here's another way to look at it, using high-school trig:

Say Hubble can see a galaxy 100,000 light years across and 10 billion light years away. The angular width of that galaxy would be ~2 seconds of arc (1 second of arc is 1/60th of 1/60 of a degree. The full moon is ~1/2 degree or 1800 seconds of arc).

Pluto is 2274km across and 4.48 billion km away. Its disk subtends only 0.1 seconds of arc, or 1/20th of the apparent width of a galaxy 10 billion light years away.

That is why it is so hard to resolve any detail on Pluto's surface.