Eris

Originally posted by leestatic
Can Eris be seen with a normal telescope? I'm not being lazy i have Googled it.

Wikipedia says "Eris currently has an apparent magnitude of 18.7, making it bright enough to be detectable to some amateur telescopes." But with a normal amateur telescope? I doubt it.

Have you seen Pluto in your telescope? What did you think about it? Don't think you will see more of Eris.

Originally posted by FabianFnas
Wikipedia says "Eris currently has an apparent magnitude of 18.7, making it bright enough to be detectable to some amateur telescopes." But with a normal amateur telescope? I doubt it.

Have you seen Pluto in your telescope? What did you think about it? Don't think you will see more of Eris.

It's an amazing dwarf planet in itself, over 14 billion kilometers from the sun, three times the distance of Pluto, and 27% more massive than Pluto and possesses a moon! I assume the analysis of the moon's orbit allows the deduction of the mass of Eris, lucky break on that one. It also may be the harbinger of planets even further and maybe even larger past the Kuiper Belt. It will also be a very interesting target for far future space probes, my guess is that would not happen in the 21'st century but the 22nd century, assuming we SURVIVE the 21'st with enough technology left to do such things.

Doing a bit of arithmetic on Eris, at 96.7 AU, squared=9650 and change, inverted=1.069E-4 th of the radiation received on the earth, which here is about 1356 watts per square meter. So that leaves Eris with about 145 MILLIwatts per square meter. However, if we assume a size of 2000 Km diameter, that would put it at 3.14E12 square meters so in total, Eris would receive about 450 Gigawatts total energy from the sun (assuming of course that it is about 2000Km wide).