Originally posted by munkey66
reply to post by JibbyJedi
poor argument.
size of the moon in comparrison as well as distance.
not that I believe it, but if a planet sized body was at that distance travelling with us, 3 days would seem possible.
Poor? I beg to differ.
The moon is 2,159 miles in diameter. (And it travels with us)
A solar eclipse can last as long as 8 minutes at it's fullest potential.
The moon is fairly large to our perspective at just that diameter across.
Elenin at best was what, 80,000 km (49709miles) across is diameter for it's dust cloud?
That's 23.02 times the diameter of the moon.
23.02 X 8 = 184 minutes, or 3.06 hours.
Elenin's gas cloud is see through, at worst, so I think the sun would penetrate it's layers of dust.
So Elenin worst case scenario, if it's corona was like a dark thick black thunder storm cloud, would give us the movie Avatar's worth of darkness.
Oh yeah, that's not even calculating for Elenin's 0.24 AU distance away from Earth at it's closest approach compared to how close the moon is. That
would shorten it's length of darkness greatly.
edit on 24-9-2011 by JibbyJedi because: (no reason given)