Slashdot Mirror
Sun's Dark Companion 'Nemesis' Not So Likely
TravisTR passes along a story about the death of Nemesis. "The data that once suggested the Sun is orbited by a distant dark companion now raises even more questions... The periodicity [of mass extinctions] is a matter of some controversy among paleobiologists but there is a growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years. The question is what? ... another idea first put forward in the 1980s is that the Sun has a distant dark companion called Nemesis that sweeps through the Oort cloud every 27 million years or so, sending a deadly shower of comets our way. ... [Researchers] have brought together a massive set of extinction data from the last 500 million years, a period that is twice as long as anybody else has studied. And their analysis shows an excess of extinctions every 27 million years, with a confidence level of 99%. That's a clear, sharp signal over a huge length of time. At first glance, you'd think it clearly backs the idea that a distant dark object orbits the Sun every 27 million years. But ironically, the accuracy and regularity of these events is actually evidence against Nemesis' existence."
The Reapers are real.
How long has it been since the last apocalypse? Basically is the odometer rolling around its 27 millionth year? If so can we see something coming? Dust cloud?
Should I start digging my bunker now, or can I wait until I have a bigger backyard?
All I can think reading this is great another stupid theory that the 2012 nut jobs can latch onto.
isn't this the most simple explaination? Most stars in Mily Way arms are known to bounce up and down the ecliptic.
the next anniversary date is...2012.
This is a case when we should be reading the comments to the article.
Are we not somewhere around two standard deviations out from the mean time between events since the last major extinction at the end of the Cretaceous? /me - thrashes for my copy of the Mayan calendar...
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
The second comment under the article seems to be a pretty serious debunking. I'm not going to take sides or tell you who's right and wrong because I don't know, but I will note that arXiv (the source for the claims) is for pre-prints and is not peer-reviewed.
Having RTFA I can answer my own question. We have 16 million years to get ready. Start saving for the deluxe model.
11 million years, so we have about 16 million years to figure out what happens and then do something about it.
The pattern has repeated itself more times than you can fathom. Organic civilizations rise, evolve, advance, and at the apex of their glory they are extinguished. The Protheans were not the first.
...was that Oracle is, in fact, pretty damned likely.
You'd see this: "There is a smidgeon of good news. The last extinction event in this chain happened 11 million years ago so, in theory at least, we have plenty of time to work out where the next catastrophe is coming from."
Another thing to keep in mind - even if it's "dark" it will still have some non-zero temperature. So one of our long wavelength satellites (including the newest crop: Herschel, Planck, and WISE) would have or will eventually see it.
WISE, especially, according to projections based on pre-launch specs will be able to identify the following:
* Gliese 229B to 150 lightyears
* A brown dwarf warmer than 200 K to 4 lightyears
* A freefloating planet like Jupiter to 1 lightyear.
At first I read "1.1 million years" and was really worried
It's the Reapers.
The periodicity of the Solar system traveling parallel to the axis of the galactic center up and down through the arm of the galaxy. This, I thought, was close the the time frame for mass extinctions and was presumed that our traveling through the more cluttered parts of the arm were to blame for us coming in contact with debris.
Pathetic earthlings. Hurling your bodies out into the void, without the slightest inkling of who or what is out here. If you had known anything about the true nature of the universe, anything at all, you would've hidden from it in terror. -- Ming the Merciless
We cannot even tell what really happened thousand years ago let alone two or twenty-four million. It is all conjecture.
A massive keg party held every 27 million years with everyone in the Milky Way invited! :)
"Either way, the origin of the 27 million year extinction cycle is hotting up to become one of the great scientific mysteries of our time. Suggestions, if you have any, in the comments section please."
Sun's Dark Companion 'Nemesis' Not So Likely
"Nemesis" is the codename for the next MySQL release, to which Oracle is giving the ax. After the 5.1 debacle, I'm not surprised the database is being touted as a "Sun's Dark Companion."
Odd, I just got this weird feeling that I'm being offtopic.
...They knew of some sort of death star/planet and they called it "Nibiru" which means "Planet of the Crossing" (why would they name it that?!) and they drew it on one of their tablets along with the other planets. BUT the Sumerians said it takes a 3600 year orbit. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_(Babylonian_astronomy) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nibiru_collision I've read books about it... very interesting stuff.
Really...So none of this sh1t really matters and I did just waste three minutes of my life! BTW that roughly 54000000000 generations! WTF!!! can't you author something meaningful?
...only it was a larger multiple: somewhere in the vicinity of every 150-180 million years. However, in this case, it's due to our solar system's z-axis oscillation with respect to the rest of the Milky Way galaxy. The dust and gas of the galaxy acts as a shield against cosmic radiation, but every 150-180 million years, our solar system reaches the z-edge of the galaxy and is maximally exposed to the elements.
What accounts for the 5-7 other mass extinctions within that time frame, however, I defer to TFA.
"I'd just like to emphasise that taking a million years isn't a metaphor here..." -Rich Bradshaw
It's been 26,999,998 years since the last mass extinction.
Do you have ESP?
Patterns are evident throughout the "natural world" (including space) - from same level (e.g., similar human-social development from groups that never cross each other) to different levels (e.g., cell formations and a bird's eye view of rural housing layouts).
In this natural world, many systems "clean" themselves. Examples include living cells, natural water filtration, and even "social systems" (e.g., jails).
What if we are the particulate matter collecting on the "mucous" layer of the Earth and the Earth ... clears its throat every 26 million years or so?
(puff - puff - pass)
L'esperienza de questa dolce vita (The experience of this sweet life) - Dante Alighieri, The Divine Comedy
The articles second comment discusses in detail the idea of a 26M year extinction cycle.
Is there any correlation between these mass extinction events/periods and regular ice ages?
I'd hate to think there was an 'orrible cunt out there seeking retribution against Sol.
I still cannot find the droids I am looking for...
Read the comment "Bad research, worse article" in the comments section. "Melott has made an arxiv carrier of various kinds of pattern searches and catastrophism scenarios in data. (What I would like to call "pseudoscience conspirationism".) " To sum it up, this article is probably sensationalist psuedoscience and there is nothing to see here.
Currently hooked on AMP
Oracle, who are probably going to cause an extinction much earlier than this....
This question is more directed toward all you helio astronomers and astro physicists.
Could it be caused by a solar event? Say, something like a Mini Nova where the sun undergoes a cyclical "hiccup".
Life is not for the lazy.
What is 96% of the universe made of?
Everything we see in the Universe, from an ant to a galaxy, is made up of ordinary particles. These are collectively referred to as matter, forming 4% of the Universe. Dark matter and dark energy are believed to make up the remaining proportion, but they are incredibly difficult to detect and study, other than through the gravitational forces they exert. Investigating the nature of dark matter and dark energy is one of the biggest challenges today in the fields of particle physics and cosmology.
The ATLAS and CMS experiments will look for supersymmetric particles to test a likely hypothesis for the make-up of dark matter.
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/lhc/WhyLHC-en.html
The 27 million year period is interesting. Could be any of a myriad forces drawing large chunks of rock towards the earth.
Next week on the sci-fi channel the sun nemesis will strike!
Why does this sound like that kind of movie but our super spy sat with a laser will save us!
Some more debunking in the second comment:
First off, there is likely no "growing consensus that something of enormous destructive power happens every 26 or 27 million years". It is an old idea, probably originated with the terrible paper by Raup and Sepkoski 1986, which I have criticized on the web several times; (...) [Not to poison the well, but Bambach published lately in Ruse and Sepkoski eds "Paleontology at the High Table." One must take a dim view with the abilities of anyone that choose to cooperate with "philosopher of biology" and known stealth creationist Ruse.]
... Sun's dark companion was called Oracle. When did they change their name to Nemesis?
Have gnu, will travel.
Why not ask the AGW crowd. They know every thing about what affects the earth. They have graphs to prove these extinctions events didn't happen and they have all come to a consensus on it. What more do you need.
Who else thought of Oracle having a business competitor when reading the headline? More importantly, whole else thought Oracle had a business competitor?
No, I wouldn't think that at all. All it backs (or would back if the data were any good) is the idea that something is happening roughly every 27 million years. A dark companion star is just one of many possible explanations of what.
"If it's real, then it gets more interesting the closer you examine it. If it's not real, just the opposite is true." -
If Bruce Willis can find the fifth element in time, we'll all be saved.
I was watching the Scyfy channel at my fiance's parent's house (why else?) and saw this idea represented in a ridiculous drama called Eureka. They even called it Nemesis. This article reads like it was ripped right from the show. Admittedly I don't know who took what from who, but I find the idea completely foolish.
The Universe:
- Imports: None. It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.
- Exports: None. See Imports.
- Population: None. It is known that there are an infinite number of worlds, simply because there is an infinite amount of space for them to be in. However, not every one of them is inhabited. Therefore, there most be a finite number of inhabited worlds. And finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero. From this it follows that the population of the whole Universe is also zero, and that any person you may meet from time to time are merely the products of a deranged imagination.
A 10 to 1 ratio of women to men vill do nicely. Prepare ze bunkerz! (based on Dr. Strangelove...)
The weirdest thing is that the same comment two minutes before was modded "Redundant".
CAn you point us to a paper on that lag ? Because for a force supposed to go at light speed, that would get some pretty nasty lag to destabilize enough of the oort cloud to change orbit to go toward the inside of the solar system as opposed to orbit around on their wide wide ecliptic.
Seriously, it's a hella good book. Wiki has a good synopsis: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(Isaac_Asimov_novel)
There is simply too much glass..
(...)it turns out that this can't explain the extinctions because the motion doesn't have had the right periodicity
First, the orbit could have changed suddenly so that instead of showing as a single the peak, the periodicity would have two or more peaks.
I stopped reading long before the (apparently) controversial comments section.
Isn't the debunker a political scientist?
Oh come on, we all know the planet is only 6,000 or so years old!
I laugh disdainfully at your so-called "science"
All joking aside, we tend to have a recession every decade around the start of the next decade. It's been this way since about 1960. It varies a year to two, but has been fairly constant, at least in the US.
Table-ized A.I.
It's just amazing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HD_5_PWtq9Q&NR=1&feature=fvwp
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5k42rjGqfPg&feature=related
There is so much more to watch and learn from, that it would be worthwhile to retire to a remote mountain cave. It'll be worth it, because there is no entertainment that could match what happens in the Solar System.
All this UFO activity occuring around our Sun, yet NASA employees report nothing. Absolutely NOTHING from NASA, as though they only have experience with arranging actors on a Sound-Stage above a remote desert region in Arizona to re-enact unproven Moon landings that require hundreds of billions of US dollars to pay-off private companies that have not contributed anything of value.
As far as I can tell, a "small" body orbiting the sun at a period of 27 million years would have a semi-major axis of 1.4 light years. The Oort Cloud is supposed to extend to nearly 1.0 light years. A body with an elliptical orbit and large enough to seriously disrupt the Oort Cloud might perturb the sun to a measurable degree, or occlude stars such that it probably would have been detected by now, if it existed. IANAP though, and so probably have something wrong there.
I’m old enough to remember 16K of memory being described as “whopping”
thank you very good blog
Really? You buy that shit?
Maybe it takes exactly 26 million years for another intelligent species to develop after the old one has wiped itself out after a few hundred thousand years. ;-)
It's actually a Death Star running on economy, damn Imperial eco-fascists
Every 27 million years a big black screen appears with big white letters reading, 'GAME OVER.'
From the article :
There is a smidgeon of good news. The last extinction event in this chain happened 11 million years ago so, in theory at least, we have plenty of time to work out where the next catastrophe is coming from.
IAAP (I am a paleontologist), and I've actually met Bambach, one of the guys mentioned in the article. He's a very good paleontologist.
However, these claims of periodicity in extinctions have been considered for a long time, ever since the pioneering work of Raup and Sepkoski in the 1980s. It is not an exaggeration to say that the question of periodicity is controversial.
A basic problem with the claims back then, and with the claims based on improved data sets now, is that this statistically difficult data to work with. It's trivial to do a Fourier transform of the data and pluck out dominant frequencies to a certain confidence level, but the underlying data has issues. Geologists are constantly revising the timescale to ever greater levels of refinement, which slightly changes the numerical timing of the events in question (it's like the time of your sample points keeps shifting around by a few percent). The extinction and other data is typically collected over intervals of geological time that are *not* equal in duration (i.e. it's unevenly aliased). Extinctions in the interval are assumed to have occurred at the end of the interval. This is most often the case for most of the extinctions, but not all of them. This is tricky stuff to work with when doing frequency analysis. And although the data compilations now are much better than a few decades ago, they inevitably have issues due to the vagaries of fossil preservation (some sites/times have much better fossil preservation than others), and of the rock record itself (e.g., the rise and fall of sea level that causes shifts in environment and depositional rates, so some times can be almost unrepresented whereas other times can have plenty of rock).
My guess is that if the frequency signal is real it will say more about some kind of cyclicity that affects terrestrial depositional and climatic processes which in turn affect fossil preservation (something analogous to Earthly Milankovitch cycles or maybe tectonic cycles), rather than some kind of entirely external process that specifically or only drives extinctions. Failure to preserve fossils at certain points in the rock record would be read as an "extinction", even if the creature survived for a bit longer. Either that, or it's some kind of numerical artifact/resonance frequency derived from hitting the practical limits of sample spacing. You're basically trying to pick a frequency signal out of data that is sampled only a few times higher than the signal (the mean sample spacing is ~3.6 to 11 million years depending on the datasets they're using).
Honestly, looking at their plot of extinction rates overlain with the 27Ma frequency (their Figure 2), I'm not all that impressed with the correspondence. Some major extinctions are 180 degrees out of phase (e.g., the Late Devonian extinction at ~372Ma and the Early Carboniferous extinction at ~326Ma) and some extinctions are doubled (e.g., the two towards the end of the Permian near 250Ma).
This movie sucked bad enough the first time, no need for a sequel please.
I believe it will all begin here...
At my house, Nemesis shows up about every 28 days.
Evidently the motion of the sun through the arms doesn't have the correct periodicity.
Emergence of "anatomically modern humans": 200,000 years ago. If you have some other reputable source that places the age of Homo sapiens" more than 25 times older than this, well... [citation needed].
Or more than likely, you're just making this stuff up.
Ok, name one. That's ok, we'll wait.
Ok, then. What DID these hypothetical advanced civiliations burn? What sort of technology did they use? How come we haven't' recovered ANY of it, ANYWHERE (although we have recovered evidence of even such relatively ephemeral things such as dinosaur feathers via their impressions in the fossil matrix).
Then the hypothetical future cockroach civilization would have found things like railroad tracks, rail cars, steamships, large masonry building, the first automobiles, pottery, primitive electrical devices, silverware, etc, etc. All of which were made in profusion by 1910 and would be a lot more easily fossilized than bones.
This one takes the cake - quoting Carl Sagan to support this fantasyland. You know what else Carl Sagan said? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Dude, you want to make claims like this - you need to cough some up.
Come on! Mass Effect already covered this topic as part of it's plot.
how is babby formed?
That's because Nemesis' orbit would certainly have been influenced by the many close encounters we know the Sun has had with other starsin the last 500 million years.
Sorry, what? The Sun has had close encounters with other stars recently? Really? I am not an astrophysicist and I might be completely mistaken, but this seems kind of totally made up.
Also, as another paleontologist has pointed out the periodicity is rather more than just a little controversial. Actually, there are several things which sound wrong in this article. I'm inclined to think that it is some of that mud used to make waters unclear. Typical obfuscation techniques used in counter-intelligence; flood the channel with noise and cranks and half-right theories. All you do is beam some "manic crazy" into the head of a targeted researcher, whisper directly to his ear canal via EM transmission, (all technology known to have existed more than thirty years ago and thus impossible to not have been refined down to the idiot-proof hand-held version level), and voila! Counter-intelligence without fingerprints, crowbars or a paper trail.
Now, I happen to think that there certainly is a cyclical destruction in effect and that it is based on a dark companion star, the Oort cloud and comet clusters. But, I think it happens a lot more regularly than 27 million years, (more like a couple hundred thousand), and that when the comet cluster knocked into lower solar orbit has finished pelting the Earth, it doesn't just vanish. It keeps on orbiting on a 2500 or so year period, losing material each time around, but pelting the Earth repeatedly nonetheless. So the cyclical disaster thing is a fair bit more frequent. We just happen to have a Dark Star showing up in. . , well right now actually, to recharge the system, as it were.
But I could be wrong. I'm on shaky ground wrt astrophysics; I've not done the work to really figure out the maths and dates, so it's pretty armchair hearsay I'm afraid.
-FL
this had something to do with the Shriekback song.
Here I thought that the current doom n gloom group think about the methane being released from the BP oil leak was going to be the one to wipe out life.
So, I guess Brick-top was wrong then. Who is going to tell him?