Originally posted by triune
There are a couple of reasons why we cant see PX (Wormwood).
1. Its a brown dwarf star. Meaning its a failed star and does not burn brightly like a 'real sun'. Therefore it does not give off very much light and cannot yet be seen with a normal optical telescope unless you know its presice location at the right time of the year. It can be detected with an infa red scope, and the US have spent billions of dollars setting up the South Pole Telescope (SPT) in Antarctica.
2. Its is said PX is approaching us from below the ecliptic, thus can only be detected from low in the southern hemisphere (thus the SPT).
It is still at least 2 - 3 years away. Its a loooong way off yet, but as it gets closer to the sun it will brighten up, and eventually will be seen in the day time and appear as a second sun in the sky.
Jupiter does not have it's own light source, it only reflects light. We can see this reflection off light from Jupiter very well indeed. And a brown dwarf could be 20-80 times the mass of Jupiter. This would be seen in visible wavelengths very clearly.
A brown dwarf would never appear as a second sun as it wouldn't ever have ignition of hydrogen-fusion. In fact it wouldn't even be as bright as the full moon.
Anyway everything else you said was just made up.
Is your best evidence for the existence of a brown dwarf in the southern hemisphere that the US has spent billions on the SPT. Hmm maybe there are plenty of other distant deep-sky objects to observe without needing to assume a localised brown dwarf?
You claim an optical scope cannot see this unless a precise location is known. Well here's news for you -> Jupiter which is smaller and would be around the same distance away is bright enough to see with the naked eye.
The argument of a brown dwarf being below the ecliptic does not bode well either, as on the same plane this would have been observed by ground based scopes when it was further away from us. Pluto in 1930, along with many other dwarf planets have been discovered using optical scopes, and the masses of these are on a scale much less than a brown dwarf's mass.
And on a different plane of orbiit it would have been observable many times as it passed above and below the Earth.
So:
-> 1. If a localised brown dwarf existed we would have observed it already by ground based optical scopes.
-> 2. Therefore it's unlikely any localised brown dwarfs exist since we haven't observed any.


Is that the correct conclusion... or was my
conclusion of him being utterly paranoid much more accurate. 