AN invisible star responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs may be circling the Sun and causing comets to bombard the Earth, scientists said.
The brown dwarf - up to five times the size of Jupiter - could be to blame for mass extinctions that occur here every 26 million years, The Sun reports.
The star - nicknamed Nemesis by NASA scientists - would be invisible as it only emits infrared light and is incredibly distant. Nemesis is believed to orbit our solar system at 25,000 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.
As it spins through the galaxy, its gravitational pull drags icy bodies out of the Oort Cloud - a vast sphere of rock and dust twice as far away as Nemesis.
These "snowballs" are thrown towards Earth as comets, causing devastation similar to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
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Now NASA scientists believe they will be able to find Nemesis using a new heat-seeking telescope that began scanning the skies in January.
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer - expected to find a thousand brown dwarf stars within 25 light years of the Sun - has already sent back a photo of a comet possibly dislodged from the Oort Cloud.
Scientists' first clue to the existence of Nemesis was the bizarre orbit of a dwarf planet called Sedna. Scientists believe its unusual, 12,000-year-long oval orbit could be explained by a massive celestial body.
Mike Brown, who discovered Sedna in 2003, said: "Sedna is a very odd object - it shouldn't be there.
"The only way to get on an eccentric orbit is to have some giant body kick you - so what is out there?"
Professor John Matese, of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said most comets come from the same part of the Oort Cloud.
He added: "There is statistically significant evidence that this concentration of comets could be caused by a companion to the Sun."
AN invisible star responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs may be circling the Sun and causing comets to bombard the Earth, scientists said. The brown dwarf - up to five times the size of Jupiter - could be to blame for mass extinctions that occur here every 26 million years, The Sun reports. The star - nicknamed Nemesis by NASA scientists - would be invisible as it only emits infrared light and is incredibly distant. Nemesis is believed to orbit our solar system at 25,000 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.
The Question
(Submitted November 30, 1996)
Do you have any new information on the Nemesis Star,the so called companion star to our Sun ?
The Answer
To recap the story of Nemesis (see, e.g., 1990 October issue of Scientific American): in 1984, Raup & Sepkoski claimed that mass extinctions, like the one that killed the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, occurred every 32 million years. Since the favored theory for the demise of dinosaurs is an asteroid or cometary impact, the periodicity would suggests some mechanism to disturb the comets in the Oort cloud every 32 million years. Richard Muller and others hypothesized that a faint companion star, nicknamed Nemesis, that orbits the Sun every 32 million years, could explain this.
However, many geologists are not convinced that mass extinctions are periodic, so they see no need for such a star. Nevertheless, Muller and colleagues have embarked on the difficult search for a possible, dim companion to the Sun. The most recent report I could find on this was a conference paper from 1994 (Carlson et al 1994 in "New Developments Regarding the KT Event and Other Catastrophes in Earth History", Houston Univ., p19-20). Here are some sentences off the abstract: "Unfortunately, standard four-color photometry does not distinguish between red dwarfs and giants. ... Every star of the correct spectral type and magnitude must be scrutinized. ... We are currently scrutinizing 3098 fields, which we believe contain all possible red dwarf candidates in the northern hemisphere. ... The software is now completed and we are eliminating stars every clear night." I presume the search is still on-going but have not yielded a positive detection.
A good description and more references can be found at: www.nineplanets.org...
You may also want to check out the article in the 1990 October issue of Scientific American
Koji Mukai and Eric Christian
with help from Drs. Chen, Loewenstein and Snowden
for Imagine the Universe!
Brown dwarfs, thought just a few years ago to be incapable of emitting any significant amounts of radio waves, have been discovered putting out extremely bright "lighthouse beams" of radio waves, much like pulsars. A team of astronomers made the discovery using the National Science Foundation's Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope....
Source
Hallinan and his team observed a set of brown dwarfs with the VLA last year, and found that three of the objects emit extremely strong, repeating pulses of radio waves. They concluded that the pulses come from beams emitted from the magnetic poles of the brown dwarfs. This is similar to the beamed emission from pulsars, which are superdense neutron stars, and much more massive than brown dwarfs.
The characteristics of the beamed radio emission from the brown dwarfs suggest to the scientists that it is produced by a mechanism also seen at work in planets, including Jupiter and Earth. This process involves electrons interacting with the planet's magnetic field to produce radio waves that then are amplified, or strengthened, by natural masers that amplify radio waves the same way a laser amplifies light waves.
Source
Well I am usually the first to tell people that Niburu is a fabrication of lies and a mad man's rambling, but I wanted to post this story just to discuss the issue.
Originally posted by tothetenthpower
reply to post by InfaRedMan
If WISE did pick it up, would NASA even release the data?
Originally posted by tothetenthpower
reply to post by ENKIJI
Alright, this is the kind of crap I am talking about in the OP.
Please, provide your sources.
