could we shine a laser on this new solar system and detect somethingin 180 years?

Tony Rusi wrote:

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/...p?story=421468

Not practically.

It's is only just possible to detect a laser beam bounced off the moon.
Thanks to the monostatic radar equation, doubling the distance between
the transmitter/receiver and the target would reduce the size of the
received
signal by a factor of 16. Trebling the distance reduces the signal by
a factor of 81, and so on.

Ninety light years is over one billion times the Earth-Moon
distance.

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Michael Morton | Need a job!
School of Information | (pretty please)
Systems, University | http://www.sys.uea.ac.uk/~mtm/work
of East Anglia, Norwich |
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