Thursday, November 3, 2011

A follow up to Y Dwarfs

Below is a little thing that approximates what it would look like on a telescope to have two objects really close together in the sky with different intensities. You can slide the slider to change the relative intensity between 50 and 300. As you can see, even if the brighter spot is only 300 times the darker spot, it is very difficult to see the less intense object in the diffraction pattern of the brighter object. If you recall or look back, we found the relative intensity to be 40,000:1 for a Sun-like star compared to a Y Dwarf both around 30 ly away, so if they were as close as shown here from our point of view, they would most likely be impossible to distinguish without other methods.

Viewing this will require installing the free Wolfram CDF viewer available here.


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