Blind spot in the Solar System
An alien spaceship the size of an Empire State Building experiences a technical issues with its cloaking device, their duty technician needs 24 hours to repair and meanwhile the alien wants to avoid being detected by the human.
Is there any place within the solar system for the alien to hide for the next 24 hours?
With the cloaking device down they cannot mask the radiowave and gamma radiation produced by their ship effectively. If they should leave the solar system their engine has to be fully engaged to full power and thus produces more gamma radiation.
To repair the cloaking device they have to expose the ships interior as well as the engine core which will emit gamma radiation to the surrounding.
The crew will avoid using radiowave for communication.
Assume the ship is already in the blind spot when their cloaking device fails.
This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/23237. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
1 answer
The Oort Cloud
The far edge of the Oort Cloud is believed to be 100,000 AU from the Sun. In fact, Duncan et al. (1987) created simulations that showed the inner edge of the Cloud to be at ~3,000 AU.
Given that 1 AU $\approx$ 8 light-minutes, $$3,000\text{ AU}\times\frac{8\text{ light-minutes}}{\text{AU}}=24,000\text{ light-minutes}\gg1\text{ light-day}$$ Therefore, any signals - even from the inner edge of the Cloud - will not reach Earth for far more than one day, at which point the ship will be long gone.
Furthermore, any signals - even gamma-rays - should be reduced in strength, compared to signals from areas near any of the planets, the Sun, or the asteroid belt.
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