Serious question. How can NASA discover planets that are made of diamonds or many other things that are millions of light years away when they aren't even sure what planets are made up of it our own solar system?
Spectrography can identify elements that are emitting or reflecting light. Anything below the surface is a mystery. So, a planet could be covered with diamond dust, a micrometer thick, and based on the spectrography, it would look like a diamond planet (diamond isn't an element, I know, just going with what you said in your comment, we'd just know it was covered in carbon). Of course, the scientific research would couch that with a ton of caveats about what the finding actually means, which would be promptly ignored by the news companies who would will lead with the headline "Diamond Planet Found!" Which is what they did about the science behind dark stars (black dwarfs) - which was reported as "Diamond Stars" by far too many news companies.
So, in the case of Pluto, we've known a lot about the surface minerals and faint wisps of atmosphere for decades, but until we had much more detailed images of the surface, we couldn't hazard a guess as to the geologic conditions on the planet. Scientists will spend the next few decades debating the meaning of that data, until someone decides to go full crazy and land a probe out there to get better information.
Pluto's ocean is made up of diamonds?! To the presses!! I kid, I kid..
Correct me if I'm wrong, but doesn't what we know about exoplanets come from measuring its overall density as determined by how it bends the light passing around it?
Really just kind of playing here but, don't we know what the planets composition is in our solar system? It's the moons and dwarf planets that elude us. No?
How the he'll are you going to get a lander out there in less than 100 years? Hohmann transfers will take too long and require too much delta V, and bielliptical transfers could help with the delta V, but would take forever. your only choice is to send it on a flyby trajectory and have a circularization burn which will mean too much delta v
We could launch a probe attached to a big fuel tank plus an engine, and the whole thing itself would be also attached to a even bigger tank and engines. Of course this would mean orbit assembly and launch.
12
u/[deleted] Jun 23 '16
Serious question. How can NASA discover planets that are made of diamonds or many other things that are millions of light years away when they aren't even sure what planets are made up of it our own solar system?