Slashdot Mirror
Nemesis, the Sun's Binary Star Companion?
0xC2 writes "The Binary Companion or 'Nemesis' theory asserts that a yet-to-be discovered companion to our Sun may actually exist. Recent observations of two nearby stars (assumed companions) show debris disks 'strikingly like the Kuiper Belt int the outer part of our Solar System'. The Binary Research Institute site is devoted to the theory, and presents a concise introduction, list of evidence, and sample calculations in support of the theory. A fascinating read, although the physics and related calculations are not trivial." Has the 'unique theory on the internet' vibe to it, but interesting nonetheless.
Isn't that Microsoft? Oops... Wrong article...
On a scale of "faked moon landing" to "electric universe", I rate this 'theory' a solid "roswell alien autopsy"
01010011011010000110111101101111011101000010000100 100000010101110110010100100000
01101100011010010111011001100101001000000110100101 101110001000000110000100100000
01100010011010010110111001100001011100100111100100 100000011100110111100101110011
01110100011001010110110100111111
... could we possibly find the outer planets by observing their influence on the inner planets' orbits, if there were a freaking brown dwarf in the neighborhood that we didn't know about?
Something like that would've ruined Kepler's whole day.
Actually I am a physicst, and while I'm not an astronomer, I do work with "dynamics" on a fulltime basis.
Not to mention, all but one real astronomer also think this theory is ridiculous. The site linked is by an AMATEUR astronomer, not someone with a formal training in the hard sciences. I'm not contradicting a specialist, I'm contradicting a whackjob internet troll. No, not you - the guy with the binary solar system website.
You don't need a companion to produce a sharp edge in the Kuiper belt. Simulations have shown that. Anyone who makes the assertion that the edges suggest such a thing ought to have at least become familiar with that research.
Furthermore, the analogy to Saturn's rings is, I suspect, misleading. The moons that directly shape the outer edge of the A ring are close to the ring and small. (They are tied to other moons via resoances so the whole system is strung together, but that's not what's being argued for here.) A star would be much more massive than the Kuiper belt and would seriously disrupt the system rather than maintain it. (It would also be pretty obvious if it were just beyond the orbit of the outer edge of the Kuiper belt. We'd feel it here, for a start.) A more distant star might be able to hold back the edge of the belt with a resonance, but that's a different thing. And odds are that such a companion would destroy a belt more readily than maintain it. (Look at Jupiter and the asteroid belt.)
It should also be noted that 300 million years is a short time in solar system terms. It's even shorter for the outer solar system where it's about one million orbits. Since things move slowly and there is little material out there, spreading is very slow. Ones the material is placed there by a larger body (like Neptune), it tends to stay put for quite a while.
I don't think you truly appreciate how BIG our solar system is. If there's a twin to our star, it would seem so far away that it would seem like it had nothing to do with us. e.g. From Pluto, our Sun looks like nothing more than a particularly bright star. Now given how far away this star would be, its gravitational effects might be difficult to detect. In fact, IIRC, there are still quite a few odd effects that the discovery of Pluto didn't quite account for. (Not big enough.) So maybe we've finally found our Planet X. Except that it isn't a planet at all. :-)
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Yes I do realize binary star systems are not rare. Not detecting it by visible light is exactly WHY classical mechanics comes into play - all you're really doing is dealing with a bunch of forces that go like 1/r^2. Investigating it for the sake of completeness is certainly not folly - however the arguments on the website linked in the article are nonsense.
I can't find it again at the moment - but I saw somewhere that they implied that the inaccuracy of predictions in precession over time was a result of our current theories being flawed, and that the binary theory somehow magically removed this inaccuracy. This is an example of the utter bullshit that anyone with an understanding of nonlinear dynamics would notice immediately. You're dealing with a many-body system here. That's inherently chaotic. That means, it's exponentially sensitive to initial conditions. Therefore, as time goes on your results get worse and worse due to small measurement errors in your initial conditions. NO MODEL can remove this effect and still claim to use newtonian physics - the equations are nonlinear and involve more than three objects interacting - therefore the equations of motion are chaotic. Period.
OF COURSE YOU CAN GET MORE ACCURATE RESULTS WHEN YOU PUT IN AN IMAGINARY EXTRA OBJECT - you can TUNE the parameters of this object arbitrarily to try to fit the experimental data. If I collect a bunch of data from all kinds of experiments, I can easily find a tenth order polynomial and get a very accurate fit to the data. This is also completely meaningless because all those fit parameters have no physical meaning.