" You mean to tell me that we can see light from the edge of the universe, but we can't tell if an object will be bright (or not) when it arrives at earth ? "
Reading the article, it seems that there's materiel that will react with the faint but steady hit of sunrays. Still , with our tech and advancement, you'd think we would be able to give a reasonably accurate prediction of whether a a very large stone will continue to shine bright when it passes by earth at supersonic speeds.
"I have an object composed of unknown materials, jumbled together in an unknown way, with unknown density. I'm going to hold it next to a light and heat source. How bright would it be?"
We literally don't know what gases, and how much of them, will evaporate off of it until they do evaporate. And that doesn't happen until it warms up more.
Yeah, let's just measure the density and composition of a comet that will be here in a few months, and with expectations that it may be releasing new gaseous formations as it gets closer, predict what will happen with those formations.
In much simpler form, it's similar to the "Where will this satellite in a decaying orbit land?"
The difficulty is not the approximation: the difficulty is that whether drag begins to increase at t=x or t=x+30sec (based on orientation when it first encounters atmosphere) cascades throughout the rest of the equations and dramatically changes the results.
" You mean to tell me that we can see light from the edge of the universe, but we can't tell if an object will be bright (or not) when it arrives at earth ? "
Reading the article, it seems that there's materiel that will react with the faint but steady hit of sunrays. Still , with our tech and advancement, you'd think we would be able to give a reasonably accurate prediction of whether a a very large stone will continue to shine bright when it passes by earth at supersonic speeds.