Originally posted by hippomchippo
Originally posted by Centurionx
Who else then? I'm curious.
physics.uwyo.edu...
iso.esac.esa.int...
Infrared astronomy is not something NASA created you know.
Originally posted by KILL_DOGG
Planet X
"Nibiru and other stories about wayward planets are an Internet hoax. There is no factual basis for these claims. If Nibiru or Planet X were real and headed for an encounter with the Earth in 2012, astronomers would have been tracking it for a decade,
Possibly as Large as Jupiter; Mystery Heavenly Body Discovered
By Thomas O'Toole, Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 30, 1983; Page A1
A heavenly body possibly as large as the giant planet Jupiter and possibly so close to Earth that it would be part of this solar system has been found in the direction of the constellation Orion by an orbiting telescope aboard the U.S. infrared astronomical satellite.
So mysterious is the object that astronomers do not know if it is a planet, a giant comet, a nearby "protostar" that never got hot enough to become a star, a distant galaxy so young that it is still in the process of forming its first stars or a galaxy so shrouded in dust that none of the light cast by its stars ever gets through.
"All I can tell you is that we don't know what it is," Dr. Gerry Neugebauer, IRAS chief scientist for California's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and director of the Palomar Observatory for the California Institute of Technology, said in an interview.
The most fascinating explanation of this mystery body, which is so cold it casts no light and has never been seen by optical telescopes on Earth or in space, is that it is a giant gaseous planet as large as Jupiter and as close to Earth as 50 billion miles. While that may seem like a great distance in earthbound terms, it is a stone's throw in cosmological terms, so close in fact that it would be the nearest heavenly body to Earth beyond the outermost planet Pluto.
"If it is really that close, it would be a part of our solar system," said Dr. James Houck of Cornell University's Center for Radio Physics and Space Research and a member of the IRAS science team. "If it is that close, I don't know how the world's planetary scientists would even begin to classify it."
New South Pole Telescope to Study Mysterious Dark Energy
By SPACE.com Staff
posted: 26 February 2007
The new South Pole Telescope (SPT) has successfully collected its first light as part of a long-term project to unravel one of the biggest mysteries in cosmology, researchers announced today.
The goal of SPT is to learn the nature of mysterious dark energy, an antigravity force that permeates the cosmos and is driving the universe apart at an ever-increasing pace.
The telescope does not make conventional images. Instead, it will take advantage of excellent viewing conditions-cold and dry-in Antarctica to detect the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation. The CMB is said to be the afterglow of the Big Bang.
On the electromagnetic spectrum, the CMB falls somewhere between heat radiation (infrared) and radio waves.
NASA launches infrared telescope to scan entire sky
By Brandon Griggs, CNN
December 14, 2009 10:28 a.m. EST
(CNN) -- NASA launched a new telescope into space on Monday to scan the cosmos for undiscovered objects, including asteroids and comets that might threaten Earth.
The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer, or WISE, spacecraft will employ an infrared camera to detect light- and heat-emitting objects that other orbiting telescopes, such as the Hubble, might miss.
...WISE also will be looking for dim stars called brown dwarfs and millions of far-away galaxies that are shrouded in dust and often can't be seen in visible light.
Sun's Nemesis Pelted Earth with Comets, Study Suggests
By Leslie Mullen
Astrobiology Magazine
posted: 11 March 2010
A dark object may be lurking near our solar system, occasionally kicking comets in our direction.
Nicknamed "Nemesis" or "The Death Star," this undetected object could be a red or brown dwarf star, or an even darker presence several times the mass of Jupiter.
Why do scientists think something could be hidden beyond the edge of our solar system? Originally, Nemesis was suggested as a way to explain a cycle of mass extinctions on Earth.
The Footprint of Nemesis
A recently-discovered dwarf planet, named Sedna, has an extra-long and usual elliptical orbit around the Sun. Sedna is one of the most distant objects yet observed, with an orbit ranging between 76 and 975 AU (where 1 AU is the distance between the Earth and the Sun). Sedna's orbit is estimated to last between 10.5 to 12 thousand years. Sedna's discoverer, Mike Brown of Caltech, noted in a Discover magazine article that Sedna's location doesn't make sense.
"Sedna shouldn't be there," said Brown. "There's no way to put Sedna where it is. It never comes close enough to be affected by the Sun, but it never goes far enough away from the Sun to be affected by other stars."
Perhaps a massive unseen object is responsible for Sedna's mystifying orbit, its gravitational influence keeping Sedna fixed in that far-distant portion of space.
John Matese, Emeritus Professor of Physics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, suspects Nemesis exists for another reason. The comets in the inner solar system seem to mostly come from the same region of the Oort Cloud, and Matese thinks the gravitational influence of a solar companion is disrupting that part of the cloud, scattering comets in its wake. His calculations suggest Nemesis is between 3 to 5 times the mass of Jupiter, rather than the 13 Jupiter masses or greater that some scientists think is a necessary quality of a brown dwarf. Even at this smaller mass, however, many astronomers would still classify it as a low mass star rather than a planet, since the circumstances of birth for stars and planets differ.
