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."

Comments

Re:Ask the global warming crowd

[RockDoctor]

They [Anthropogenic Global Warming non-deniers] 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.

Given your evident attitude to the well-established science about anthropogenic global warming, I'm utterly un-astonished that you don't know (or are trying to conceal) the facts such as

• study of events surrounding the Palaeocene-Eocene mass-extinction (discovered in the late 19th century) including
• the discovery of the Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (around 2000 - I had the ink-on-paper version of the paper land on my previous door mat)
• the carbon isotope excursions that indicate the release of large amounts of methane,
• the magnetostratigraphy which reveals the Milankovich cyclicities that provide the local relative dating,
• the micropalaeontology that provides the absolute dating (and which I use several times each year to ensure that oil wells are efficiently positioned to exploit Palaeocene reservoirs).

But I'm sure that all of those fields of research are overweighed by your fear of facing the consequences of your, my, and our parent's burning of fossil fuels. Does that make you feel better, or do you want to put your head under a security blanket now?