You emerge from a wormhole into a brand new star system, how long does it take to accurately map all orbital bodies?

Imagine we could open a wormhole or a jump point to a new star system. How soon would it be possible to have an accurate map of the major bodies in that system? In sci-fi, this sort of information seems to be easily available through "scanning the system" but what does that actually mean? What sort of scanners or sensors could we use to detect orbital bodies?

Using our own solar system as an example... we have made most of our discoveries through optical observation, this has taken hundreds of years, but we could imagine that time would be much shorter with modern telescopes and techniques. But unless we some had other sort method of detection, this would still be a very long process.

I would imagine that bodies closest to the star/s would be the fastest to discover, with the amount of time dramatically increasing as we move to the outermost planets. Maybe an entirely accurate map would never be feasible (just as we are uncertain of planets outside of Neptune in our own system, or we were uncertain of the number of moons Pluto had until the New Horizons flyby). Would there be optimal places to emerge to make this process faster? Like in the OORT cloud range for example, or extremely close to the star/s? If a completely accurate map isn't possible, how accurate of a map would we need for travel through the system?

posted over 7 years ago

johny5w‭

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