i certainly hope the end of this lame 2012 hysteria is near..
Nemesis is a hypothetical hard-to-detect red dwarf star, white dwarf star or brown dwarf, originally postulated in 1984 to be orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 50,000 to 100,000 AU (about 0.8-1.5 light-years), somewhat beyond the Oort cloud, to explain a perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record, which seem to occur once per 26 million years.
As of 2011, over 1300 brown dwarfs have been identified and none of them are inside the Solar System. More recent theories suggest that other forces, like close passings of other stars, or the angular effect of the galactic gravity plane working against the outer solar orbital plane, may be the cause of orbital perturbations of some outer solar system objects.
In 2010, two astronomers, Melott and Bambach analysed earlier data on outer solar system object orbital patterns and announced that their findings suggest Nemesis couldn't possibly exist.
In 2011, Coryn Bailer-Jones did an analysis of craters on the surface of the Earth and reached the conclusion that the earlier findings of simple periodic patterns (implying periodic comet showers dislodged by a hypothetical Nemesis star) to be statistical artifacts, and found that the crater record shows no evidence for Nemesis.
The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) failed to discover Nemesis in the 1980s. The 2MASS astronomical survey, which ran from 1997 to 2001, failed to detect a star, or brown dwarf, in the solar system.
Using newer and more powerful infrared telescope technology, able to detect brown dwarfs as cool as 150 Kelvin out to a distance of 10 light-years from the sun, preliminary results from the Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE survey) have not, to date, detected Nemesis, although the analysis of the full survey is not yet complete.
Scientists no longer think an object like Nemesis could exist because if it did it would have been detected long ago in infrared sky surveys.
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edit on 8/11/11 by mzungu because: (no reason given)


