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:Second comment debunks

[Randle_Revar]

that's the third comment.

Here is a bit from the second comment:

The fact is that with modern and better paleontological data any peridocity is rejected, as easily checked with autocorrelation [Alroy, 2008]:

"Quantitatively, extinction rates in the Fossil Record 2 family data (3) and Sepkoski’s family and genus data (1, 2) are not correlated with themselves at any time lag (49), which is a necessary condition for periodicity to hold. That said, analyses of origination rates in all three datasets (49, 50) suggest short-term autocorrelation. However, the current dataset shows no autocorrelation in either kind of rate (Fig. S1), and a standard spectral analysis (Fig. S2) also suggests purely random variation through the time series (i.e., white noise)."