rh@mit-eddie.UUCP (Randy Haskins) (05/22/84)
In the Boston Globe today (Monday 21 May), there was a small article that will supposedly be written about 14 million years from now about the impending return of "Nemesis." This is supposedly a dark dwarf star that orbits our Sun with a period of approximately 26 M years. (doing math, you see that it last appeared about 12 M years ago, and that it also appeared around the time (~ 65 M years ago) that the dinosaurs disappeared, and that it is within 1M years of apohelion.) The dwarf supposedly has a large contingent of comets, some of which will hit the earth and cause devastation. Doing a quick and dirty calculation, IF the comet had a near-circular orbit (which it obviously doesn't but I just wanted to get within a couple orders of magnitude), I come up with 87k A.U.'s (about 1.3 light years), contrasted with about 17 A.U.'s for Halley's comet, as a mean orbital distance. I would think that's quite a distance for it not to be affected by other stars (since it's probably swinging out between 10 and 100 times that far, the article doesn't say much in the way of real science, like its eccentricity, its perihelion distance, etc.). Anyway... I was wondering how come I never hear-tell of this before. Is this a recent discovery? Is it something that a lot of you experts think is bogus? I'd be interested in hearing what is known about this so far. -- Randwulf (Randy Haskins); Path= genrad!mit-eddie!rh
nather@utastro.UUCP (05/24/84)
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Apparently you are referring to the "Death Star" theory (*not* the
AT&T logo :-) whereby an orbital companion to the sun, dim enough
so Clyde Tombaugh wouldn't have found it while searching for Pluto,
perturbs the mythical "Oort Cloud" of comets as it wanders by, causing
comets to drop on the earth & wipe out dinosaurs. It seems to be the
rage now, since there hasn't been an earthbreaker theory since the DOD
got worried about the Russians tickling an asteroid out of orbit and
aiming it at Cleveland.
It assumes: 1) The presence of the Oort cloud; 2)The presence of the
postulated "death star"; 3) The reality of the periodicities uncovered
in the distribution of earth-crater ages; 4) The total lack of noise
in the data subjected to FFT analysis.
If you are convinced by this, I've got some property in Florida ...
--
Ed Nather
ihnp4!{ut-sally,kpno}!utastro!nather
Astronomy Dept., U. of Texas, Austin