Nemesis-Sun Companion

[MeteorWayne]

Great stuff, mike.<br />Thanx for posting it here! <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>

 

[3488]

Hi all, <br /><br />A while back, I read that there was evidence of something pretty massive & very distant in the direction of the constellation of Delphinus the Dolphin, close to its border with Equelus the Little Horse, by observing the motion of long period comets. <br /><br />I assume this is not so. Also I thought that the presence of a large massive object could be determined by the Sun's own orbital motion around the Milky Way's centre?<br /><br />I doubt that Nemesis exists.<br /><br />Andrew Brown. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080">"I suddenly noticed an anomaly to the left of Io, just off the rim of that world. It was extremely large with respect to the overall size of Io and crescent shaped. It seemed unbelievable that something that big had not been visible before".</font> <em><strong><font color="#000000">Linda Morabito </font></strong><font color="#800000">on discovering that the Jupiter moon Io was volcanically active. Friday 9th March 1979.</font></em></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://www.launchphotography.com/</font><br /><br /><font size="1" color="#000080">http://anthmartian.googlepages.com/thisislandearth</font></p><p><font size="1" color="#000080">http://web.me.com/meridianijournal</font></p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

Hello, Andrew, <img src="/images/icons/laugh.gif" /><br /><br />There's certainly nothing wrong with being skeptical. This is healthy. As a matter of fact, while there was only the evidence of mass extinctions concerning Nemesis, I was pretty skeptical, too.<br /><br />I thought pretty hard about this during the mid to late '80's. One conclusion I reached is that mass extinctions are not neccessarily created by collisions. A pretty intensive search for evidence of a collision was started for the Megafaunal extinction, the most recent one involving the famous Wooly Mammoth, and researchers came up dry. I reviewed that event after 9/11 when my employment situation was enforced idleness and found that there is a great deal of evidence for an extremely severe drought in that case (this is another thread in some other forum, maybe Forces of Nature. I haven't checked recently, I've been too busy making an A in calculus {Pats self on head <img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" /> }).<br /><br />Anyway, I concluded, as undoubtably you have too, that the geological record is too fuzzy to support a periodicity. Even if Raup, Sepkoski, Muller et. al are right, there would be a delay of something like a million years between the inner solar system being charged with comets and an actual collision. There's no technological fix to this.<br /><br />(BTW, carbon dating became more accurate when they used laser flouroscopy to count individual carbon atoms in the carbon dating technique. They didn't have to wait for a carbon 14 atom to decay to count it. I'm sure this can be used for other elements, though I haven't seen anything on this.)<br /><br />Mostly I have come around to "the preponderance of evidence says there is a Nemesis" by observed damage to the Kuiper belts of the Sun and other stars.<br /><br />I have vaguely heard of the long period comet project and wish I knew more. The article gave the researcher's name but I can't remember it after all these years. I hope SEARCH get ahold

 

[mikeemmert]

I found the STEREO article that was recently done in SDC. Like most SDC articles, it has plenty of links.<br /><br />I tracking incoming comets back will work then STEREO would facilitate this by providing precise position/velocity measures for the comets. There already exists a network of people who monitor the SOHO site and many of it's comets were found by amateur researchers.

 

[alokmohan]

Will STEREO throw any light on Nemesis?

 

[MeteorWayne]

I wouldn't think so. They is pointing at the sun (hence is not designed to look for faint objects) and even if there were a gravitational shift in the barycenter (which has not been detected so far by other means) the mission is not designed to look for that either. <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>

 

[alokmohan]

So nemesis is still hypothesis.

 

[mikeemmert]

here's an article on mass extinctions from Live Science. I got it through Yahoo! News, strangely when I clicked the link to go to LiveScience.com, I couldn't find it there and had to use the back button. Oh, well, here it is.:<br /><br />"<font color="yellow">New Recipe: How to Make a Mass Extinction Michael Schirber<br />Special to LiveScience<br />LiveScience.com <br />Fri Oct 27, 1:30 PM ET<br /> <br />Apocalypses may not be all fire and brimstone. A growing number of paleontologists say that Earth-smashing meteors cannot take all the blame for the many mass extinctions that dot our planet's fossil record. The true causes seem to be more complex.<br /> <br />"The [meteor] impact model has been so successful because it's easy to explain and easy to understand," said Nan Arens of Hobart and William Smith College in Geneva, NY. "However, the simple answer isn't always the best one."<br /><br />At the annual meeting of the Geological Society of America this week in Philadelphia, Arens and others argued that the combined punch of volcanoes, climate change and impacts leaves many species teetering on the brink of extinction. One final blow brings collapse. <br /><br />The same scenario could be happening now. <br /><br /><br />Dino disappearance <br /><br />The most famous of all giant space rocks is the one that presumably killed off the non-avian dinosaurs 65 million years ago, in the so-called K-T extinction event. But this may not be the whole story.<br /><br />For several years, Gerta Keller of Princeton University and her colleagues have been arguing that the widely-accepted dino-killer—a space rock that left a 100-mile-wide crater around Chicxulub, Mexico—happened 300,000 years too soon. Keller therefore believes that this impact was just one of several smoking guns.<br /><br />"Impacts by themselves simply don't cause major mass extinctions," she told LiveScience.<br /><br />K</font>

 

[MeteorWayne]

Nice catch mike, thanks <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><font color="#000080"><em><font color="#000000">But the Krell forgot one thing John. Monsters. Monsters from the Id.</font></em> </font></p><p><font color="#000080">I really, really, really, really miss the "first unread post" function</font><font color="#000080"> </font></p> </div>

 

[superluminal]

Hi Mike<br />I've read the entire post and I also, am fascinated by this subject.<br /> Consider this outside of the box alternative. <br /><br />Conventional thinking and wisdom aside, what if, this nemesis does exist but it exist out of our visual perspective?<br /><br />OK stay calm, I know you're not into fantasy. You have to admit that the study of astronomy is fantastic.<br /><br /><br /> Spectral Classes<br />Star Type Color Approximate Surface Temperature Average Mass (The Sun = 1) <br />Average Radius (The Sun = 1) Average Luminosity <br />(The Sun = 1) Main Characteristics Examples <br /><br />O Blue over 25,000 K 60 15 1,400,000 Singly ionized helium lines (H I) either in emission or absorption. Strong UV continuum. 10 Lacertra <br /><br />B Blue 11,000 - 25,000 K 18 7 20,000 Neutral helium lines (H II) in absorption. Rigel<br />Spica <br /><br />A Blue 7,500 - 11,000 K 3.2 2.5 80 Hydrogen (H) lines strongest for A0 stars, decreasing for other A's. Sirius, Vega <br /><br />F Blue to White 6,000 - 7,500 K 1.7 1.3 6 Ca II absorption. Metallic lines become noticeable. Canopus, Procyon <br /><br />G White to Yellow 5,000 - 6,000 K 1.1 1.1 1.2 Absorption lines of neutral metallic atoms and ions (e.g. once-ionized calcium). Sun, Capella <br /><br />K Orange to Red 3,500 - 5,000 K 0.8 0.9 0.4 Metallic lines, some blue continuum. Arcturus, Aldebaran <br />M Red under 3,500 K 0.3 0.4 0.04<br />(very faint) Some molecular bands of titanium oxide. Betelgeuse, Antares <br /><br /><br /> OK, to the outside of the box hypothesis.<br /> <br />Lets examine a young type O or B star that is 60 solar masses and 15 solar radius.<br /><br />Perhaps , that deep inside one of these huge massive stars, that a singular, centered, circular mass exist, that is 10,000 times the density of iron and is compressed into a diameter of approximately 1600 kilometers under extreme heat and pressure.<br /><br />In the birthing belly of this massive O or B blue star, a dark matter planetoid awaits it's soon to be birth, of a <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><br /><strong><font size="3" color="#3366ff">Columbia and Challenger </font></strong></p><p><strong><font size="3" color="#3366ff">Starships of Heroes</font></strong></p> </div>

 

[superluminal]

Like This ? <div class="Discussion_UserSignature"> <p><br /><strong><font size="3" color="#3366ff">Columbia and Challenger </font></strong></p><p><strong><font size="3" color="#3366ff">Starships of Heroes</font></strong></p> </div>

 

[mikeemmert]

<p>Hi, folks <br /><br />I've been away from posting a lot on Space.com because I was passing a course in calculus . Anyway, I went to Space.com today to look over the articles (a luxury I could ill-afford over the past semester) and bingo!!! - an article about the formation of multiple stars!. I remembered this thread so I decided to bump it with the new information.<br /><br />Unfortunately I used "bookmarks" to get here so I don't have the article to cut and paste, but that's alright, might even be better since you have the link and can read it.<br /><br />Essentially what's going on with the article is that long baseline radio interferometry has been used to examine a brand new star system, just formed. There's still a great deal of dust in this system, but the radio waves could penetrate it. It's about 450 light years away.<br /><br />It's a triple star system. Since the discs have not finished collapsing, we can see the plane of these discs. According to the authors, there is a binary pair which apparently formed from the same gas and dust cloud and is still embedded in it. The plane of the orbits of the stars lines up with the plane of the disc.<br /><br />However, there is a third member of the system which is also still embedded in it's disc. The disc associated with the single star is rotating in a different plane from the pair.<br /><br />The authors think that the third star originated in a different location and was captured by the pair. I don't think that location was too far away, being in the same Giant Molecular Cloud as the pair, but they could have been drifiting together, or have grown larger from material in the GMC thus having their gravitational fields overlap.<br /><br />At this point, lest I lead you astray with poorly memorized trivia, it's best to read the article.<br /><br /></p>

 

[mikeemmert]

Hello, Superluminal, I missed your post before I submerged myself into the amazing world of mathematics. Who needs science-ficition and fantasy? real math is quite odd enough!<br /><br />I guess you've noticed, some long-time posters and even moderators get kind of <img src="/images/icons/mad.gif" /> when people start posting about the influence of electric and magnetic fields in star formation. I think by the time a system has evolved to the point of the system in the post before this one, electromagnetic forces have become very much subdued compared to gravitational forces, and gravity swamps them out.<br /><br />However, there has been some talk in <i>Astronomy</i> and <i>Sky and Telescope</i> about the role of electromagnetic fields in the very, very earliest stages of star formation, before dense cores and asteroid sized objects.<br /><br />In fact, I even have an image, my first attempt at photo enhancement.<br /><br />But that would hijack this thread, really. So I'm going to start a new one. Please post there. It will be called, "The Other End of the Horsehead Nebula".<br /><br />That's a serious title. It's about the horsehead nebula, no kidding. Check it out! <img src="/images/icons/cool.gif" />