...unless you're at least a post-graduate student. IMHO, some part of the academic criticism that Lynds is receiving is caused by snobbery and people being too lazy to read his work.
But my gut feeling is that it's nothing special; I haven't read the paper but the eurekalert.org article didn't inspire much confidence: spelling and grammatical mistakes, unnamed sources, drooling headlines, and reams of physics buzzwords.
As an adolescent geek I came up with dozens of new "theories"... none of which were well-informed, let alone scientifically testable. I admire the guy's perseverance, but I can't blame people for being skeptical.
Incidentally, this was in the local papers several weeks ago, with healthily skeptical comments by a couple of local academics. I am an under-graduate maths student at Victoria University, and I know of two lecturers there who specialise in time, but neither were named in the eurekalert.org article--IIRC, they weren't particularly welcoming of the paper.
Yeah that's my point, if we had another star that close *we would notice it*.
From Space.com I got a bit more info about it, and apparently Nemesis is a red dwarf (a small and dim star) with an orbit between 1 and 3 light years from Sol. I don't know if that means they have narrowed it down to that range through theory, or if the orbit has a perihelion (closest point to sun) of 1 ly and aphelion (the other extreme) of 3 ly. Probably the latter.
I guess a star that's relatively only a little closer than Alpha Centauri, but much dimmer, would be harder to find.
I read about something called the "Nemesis Theory", by Richard Muller, which proposes that Sol is actually a binary star system (in which Sol B is called Nemesis or the Death Star;-). Every 26 million years Nemesis passes through the Oort cloud and collects comets, some of which hit us.
The evidence for this is the periodic drops in biodiversity (i.e. mass extinctions) that seem to occur every 26 million years (according to some paleontolists). However, we are between extinctions, and should be relatively trouble free for more than 10 million years.
From other posts in the vicinity it looks like Nemesis wasn't what you were talking about, but I guess it's in the same category. Personally, I think we would know if there was another star--even a small dark one--that close to us.
(Source: Michio Kaku, _Hyperspace_, pp. 296-298. Recommended for people like me who can't get past first-year university but like scientific things anyhow.)
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...unless you're at least a post-graduate student. IMHO, some part of the academic criticism that Lynds is receiving is caused by snobbery and people being too lazy to read his work.
But my gut feeling is that it's nothing special; I haven't read the paper but the eurekalert.org article didn't inspire much confidence: spelling and grammatical mistakes, unnamed sources, drooling headlines, and reams of physics buzzwords.
As an adolescent geek I came up with dozens of new "theories"... none of which were well-informed, let alone scientifically testable. I admire the guy's perseverance, but I can't blame people for being skeptical.
Incidentally, this was in the local papers several weeks ago, with healthily skeptical comments by a couple of local academics. I am an under-graduate maths student at Victoria University, and I know of two lecturers there who specialise in time, but neither were named in the eurekalert.org article--IIRC, they weren't particularly welcoming of the paper.
Yeah that's my point, if we had another star that close *we would notice it*.
From Space.com I got a bit more info about it, and apparently Nemesis is a red dwarf (a small and dim star) with an orbit between 1 and 3 light years from Sol. I don't know if that means they have narrowed it down to that range through theory, or if the orbit has a perihelion (closest point to sun) of 1 ly and aphelion (the other extreme) of 3 ly. Probably the latter.
I guess a star that's relatively only a little closer than Alpha Centauri, but much dimmer, would be harder to find.
I read about something called the "Nemesis Theory", by Richard Muller, which proposes that Sol is actually a binary star system (in which Sol B is called Nemesis or the Death Star ;-). Every 26 million years Nemesis passes through the Oort cloud and collects comets, some of which hit us.
The evidence for this is the periodic drops in biodiversity (i.e. mass extinctions) that seem to occur every 26 million years (according to some paleontolists). However, we are between extinctions, and should be relatively trouble free for more than 10 million years.
From other posts in the vicinity it looks like Nemesis wasn't what you were talking about, but I guess it's in the same category. Personally, I think we would know if there was another star--even a small dark one--that close to us.
(Source: Michio Kaku, _Hyperspace_, pp. 296-298. Recommended for people like me who can't get past first-year university but like scientific things anyhow.)