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Old 01-20-2016, 11:34 AM   #2564
polak
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Quote:
Originally Posted by MattyC View Post
That doesn't seem to make a lot of sense. The solar system is 9 billion KMs across. Light travels over a billion KMs per hour. If we were on Pluto, and this planet was on the other side of the solar system, it would take less than a day for light from the Sun to reach it and bounce back to Pluto. Please correct me if I'm wrong on this, physics/math was not my strong suit.

Is it simply that it's orbit would take hundreds of years and we just haven't been looking that way for very long? I understand that space is impossibly huge, but we can see galaxies and the beginnings of the universe, but not this planet revolving around our own Sun?
No physics expert either so I might be wrong, but I'm not talking about the speed of the light. Light dispurses as it travels away from the source. Only a small fraction of the light from the sun hits this planet (which is further than pluto, at least in the time we've been looking with telescopes) and then even less of that light hits earth on it's way back.

Galaxies and stars emit way more light than this relatively microscopic (compared to stars and galaxies) planet reflects.

Last edited by polak; 01-20-2016 at 11:39 AM.
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