Eris, the goddess of discord and strife and the most massive dwarf planet, is up to her usual tricks.
There is one important catch. Even if every single telescope in the world were watching, most would not see a thing. That’s because Eris is so small that if it is blocking the star from one spot on the earth it is not blocking it from most others. The easiest way to think of this is to imagine that that one star being occulted is the only star in the entire sky and it is super bright. As Eris moves in front of the star it makes a shadow on the earth, and that shadow is the size of Eris itself. Eris has a diameter about 5 times smaller than that of the earth, so the shadow covers an area something like 5 times 5 = 25 times smaller than the earth itself. It’s not quite that bad, though, because, like a lunar eclipse, the shadow of Eris sweeps across the face of the earth, making a track that looks something like the picture here.
The first positive report came from Sebastian Sarabia, Alain Maury and Caisey Harlingten at the San Pedro de Atacama Celestial Explorations Observatory in Chile, who saw the star disappear for 76 seconds. Later it was reported that Emmanuel Jehin at the TRAPPIST telescope, about 700 km south in La Silla Chile also saw the star disappear. This means we’re in business. While each single detection gives you only one chord across the body, it only takes two different chords to precisely define the size of a circle. And since we are pretty certain Eris is massive enough to be spherical (Pluto, only 80% the mass of Eris, is spherical), that means a size can be measured.
Next up: What does all of this mean for the dwarf planets and the solar system?
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