I watch a lot of science content online and I always see stuff like “scientists have found a planet 100 light years away that is twice the mass of earth made out of solid methane and rains diamonds at 400mph” and then others that say “scientists think there could be a ninth planet passed Neptune but we’re not sure, maybe, who knows?” Like, how do we know so many specifics of these incredibly far off worlds but can’t figure out what’s in our own relative backyard?
In: Planetary Science
When we look for planets in other systems, we’re looking at all the stars we can point a telescope at, and writing down which ones we see planets at. We mostly find the ones that are easy to find, because they’re big and close to their stars, so either they transit the star or they make it wobble in a detectable way. So we have a long list of whatever we happened to find that’s the easiest to find.
In our solar system, you’re talking about finding one particular planet, that’s not conveniently between us and a star that’s very close to it. The only way to see something like that is if you know exactly where to look for it, and even then it’ll be hard to see because nothing is shining very much light on it.
It’s like saying that we can throw a net in the ocean and pull out thousands of fish, so why did it take us so long to find a coelacanth? One technique is just kinda surveying a huge category of common things you happen to find, the other is looking for a very specific and rare thing when you don’t know what it looks like or where to look.
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