Winston: "It's guesswork based on light variations. It was never more than a dot in every telescope"
Indeed, the "images" I've seen are just a few pixels wide.
"Harrumph. And I thought we could read a license plate on Mars."
As I've been saying for a long time now, perhaps too much technology has been produced to find planets and other objects many dozens of light years from Earth, and not enough for spotting what asteroids, comets or rogue planets may be headed into our neighborhood.
People these days aren't as excited about new planets as they once were. But big objects entering our solar system, and those that might come close to earth, still get people's attention. Plus our survival could depend on it one day.
Many are still talking about Apohis and the 2029 and 2036 fly-bys (oddly enough, both on April 13), even though it is said it poses no threat to the planet. The chatter is only going to increase as we get closer to the dates. You ask those same sky watchers to tell you the name of any 3 extrasolar planets, they usually can't tell you. But they sure seem to remember some of the big rocks and ice balls that appear to be headed in our general direction … Halley, Hale-Bopp, Oumuamua, Apophis, etc…
Dan
