WISE makes startling "Brown Dwarf" discovery

Scientists using the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer (WISE) have made an interesting discovery. It was belied that there would be many bodies in space intermediate in size between planets and stars; they would be massive enough to produce heat, but not massive enough to initiate nuclear fusion. These giant planets, or abortive stars, have been nick-named "Brown Dwarfs." It was expected that these transitional bodies would be quite common, but examination of data from the WISE satellite suggests otherwise:

Now, just as scientists are "meeting and greeting" the new neighbors, WISE has a surprise in store: there are far fewer brown dwarfs around us than predicted.
"This is a really illuminating result," said Davy Kirkpatrick of the WISE science team at NASA's Infrared Processing and Analysis Center at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. "Now that we're finally seeing the solar neighborhood with keener, infrared vision, the little guys aren't as prevalent as we once thought."
Previous estimates had predicted as many brown dwarfs as typical stars, but the new initial tally from WISE shows just one brown dwarf for every six stars.

www.sciencedaily.com... %3A+Latest+Science+News%29

The practical upshot of this is that it is now even less likely that the Sun has an "invisible companion."

There is far more "invisible" than visible in our Universe. What humans can perceive in the visible spectrum is ridiculous, we are blinder than bats.

reply to post by JibbyJedi

www.sciencedaily.com... ceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

But, unlike bats, our intelligence can devise machines that can make the invisible visible to us.

Originally posted by DJW001

The practical upshot of this is that it is now even less likely that the Sun has an "invisible companion."

I am kind of surprised you even bring up Nibiru or whatever you want to call it. You being a scientific mind and all, I would think it beneath you, but it will get your thread rolling I suppose.

With that said, it's not like your article says there are no brown dwarfs out there, just less than they thought. It only takes one for the sun to have a "companion"!

Originally posted by DJW001
It was expected that these transitional bodies would be quite common, but examination of data from the WISE satellite suggests otherwise:

How do you get that from this discovery? How many stars are there? Brown Dwarfs = 1 for every 6 stars.

The practical upshot of this is that it is now even less likely that the Sun has an "invisible companion."

Less of a chance than what they originally thought, maybe. But then again, why do you think that it's not likely when NASA was even believing that there were 1 for every star not too long ago. Now it's down to 1 for every 6 stars. I would call that quite common!

Originally posted by SunnyDee

Originally posted by DJW001

The practical upshot of this is that it is now even less likely that the Sun has an "invisible companion."

I am kind of surprised you even bring up Nibiru or whatever you want to call it. You being a scientific mind and all, I would think it beneath you, but it will get your thread rolling I suppose.

With that said, it's not like your article says there are no brown dwarfs out there, just less than they thought. It only takes one for the sun to have a "companion"!

Until a thing is proven, or disproven, it remains unproven. Even then, there's nothing saying that a disproven thing will remain that way. Nothing ought be beneath a scientist.

Yes a little less than twenty percent chance ...but that doesnt mean we are not accompnied or even herded along by more than one dwarf......
The brown dwarf idea is not dead till the preturbations of the OOrt cloud are expained, as well as all near space, mapped and scanned for such objects...
I thought, however, that they been doing this for decades already.....
This project is hardly over yet......

reply to post by stirling

Yes a little less than twenty percent chance ...but that doesnt mean we are not accompnied or even herded along by more than one dwarf......
The brown dwarf idea is not dead till the preturbations of the OOrt cloud are expained, as well as all near space, mapped and scanned for such objects...
I thought, however, that they been doing this for decades already.....
This project is hardly over yet......

The most important thing being that the hunt has been on for over twenty years. Absence of evidence can sometimes be be considered as evidence of absence.

reply to post by DJW001


Interesting discovery, yet you been trying to debunk a lot of Nibiru threads in the past, so lets just call this brown dwarf planet Marduk? Maybe Tyche, hell even Nibiru...

So, scientists can't even postulate correctly regarding a whole/basic system, why should I take any of their other claims (specifically regarding the likelihood of other planets with life) without a brown dwarf sized grain of salt?

Whether it's a religious zealot or a zealot of science, they make themselves look foolish by their declarations lacking wisdom. Wouldn't it be better to simply lay out the scope of our guesses and wait to see what is true?

What might be true in the area of the universe we observe may not be true for other regions. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised by just about anything; Life on other planets (or them being 100 times/100th our size), new types of stars we have never observed, solar systems that don't follow any currently observed patterns, no life anywhere else in the universe, etc.

Until it is observed repeatedly, it is not scientific. Until it is understood, it is not wisdom.

reply to post by CrikeyMagnet


I agree, but if you have been around a while, DWJ is frequently in the nibiru-planet X threads, pretty much putting down any thoughts or possibilities of a nibiru, and making many in the process feel like fools for considering it, so I felt it should be pointed out he seemed to give his thread a shameless bump with his last sentence of a "sun companion".

Hi,
So, if it's there, it's always been there and therefore the planetary anomalies that we don't notice because it's always been the same?

Originally posted by stirling
Yes a little less than twenty percent chance ...

Actually it's less than half that likely. Wide separated binaries, defined as a separation greater than about 200 AU, make up about 9 percent of local stars at best:
articles.adsabs.harvard.edu...
If our solar system were a "binary," it would have to be one such system; it's clearly not a close binary system with two stars closely orbiting each other at small distances as many binaries are, so that leaves about a 9% chance of it being a binary based on pure random chance. Realistically we know the odds are even less than that; we know there's no binary star anywhere near 200 AUs of the sun. If it exists it would have to be at Oort cloud distances, an even smaller proportion of the population of local stars. I wouldn't hold my breath with odds like that.

The brown dwarf idea is not dead till the preturbations of the OOrt cloud are expained,

What's there to explain? Why there's a slight perceived abundance of comets from a given arc of the sky? Could have just as easily have been due to a close encounter with another star long ago in the solar system's history. Could there be a brown dwarf out there? Maybe, but there's no particular reason to believe that's true rather than anything else. The odds of it being true are far lower than most around here seem to understand.

reply to post by JibbyJedi

What humans can perceive in the visible spectrum is ridiculous, we are blinder than bats.

WISE did not use the visible spectrum.

reply to post by stirling

The brown dwarf idea is not dead till the preturbations of the OOrt cloud are expained, as well as all near space, mapped and scanned for such objects...

A brown dwarf is not the only possible explanation. WISE has "mapped" the entire sky. There are, I know, at least two astronomers who are eagerly searching the data for any indication of a large unknown body.

Originally posted by JibbyJedi
There is far more "invisible" than visible in our Universe. What humans can perceive in the visible spectrum is ridiculous, we are blinder than bats.

Agreed, it's what we "can't" see that is of importance ... and the infrared spectrum, just "slightly" lesses our blindness ... but not by much.

Originally posted by DJW001
reply to post by JibbyJedi

 

www.sciencedaily.com... ceDaily%3A+Latest+Science+News%29

But, unlike bats, our intelligence can devise machines that can make the invisible visible to us.

And even then they decide to invent Dark Energy and Dark matter which can not be detected in any direct way that make up 90% of everything hahaha...

Come on now we are still as blind as bats. Well, the bats that actually have poor eyesight that is.

reply to post by bjarneorn

How about radio frequencies?
Ultraviolet?
X-ray?
Anything else?

Originally posted by Phage
Anything else?

Since everything, are waves ... even the motion of photons, it's slightly more complicated than that, isn't it Phage?

The entire subject of photons travelling through space, without being able to be diverted, and giving us the possibility of seeing Big Bang, isn't really accurate is it.

So, instead of throwing everything everyone says into the dustbin, how about looking closer at it ... if there is an anomaly in the elipsis of the planets. Than it is perfectly legitimate, to see if another object in the kupler field explains it ... if not, one has to concurr that current models ... of gravitational pull, are incomplete.