In the best case, the detection is at the 2.4 sigma confidence level (less than the usual 3 for reasonable confidence and will below the 5 required for strong confidence), and if previously suspected issues with the instrument are true, the detection could disappear completely.
I do not have a strong confidence in this result. (But at least they didn’t publish it in Nature, in which case you would absolutely know it’s wrong…)
Are the tracking systems for those massive telescopes sophisticated enough to track objects by designation, or do they still require coordinates? Like I know they have tracking for earths rotation but I can’t even imagine needing to look up the info to set sights on some body for the allotted view time, however many days that would be done for (I assume it’s a set of long precise numbers, far too long to easily memorize)
I’d love to have been in the room when Galileo sent back its first images of Io back in the day. The collective “wtf am I looking at?” reaction would be priceless.
The study suggests that some event within the last 350 million years altered its trajectory, preventing it from settling into a circular orbit.
That’s within the current best estimates for the age of Saturn’s ring system… maybe the same catastrophic event that formed the rings is also responsible for the anomaly in Titan’s orbit?
astronomy
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