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Underground > Laboratory >

Nemesis: The Black Sun

15:19 / 23.01.06

Does our sun have a dark doppelganger?

This idea was sort of scoffed at in this old thread, and used as a magical concept in this thread.

Now, it turns out there may be (or may once have been) an invisible sun (it gives its heat to everyone) (and it helped create the Kuiper Belt.)

From that last SPACE.com link:

Debris disks discovered around two nearby stars look strikingly like the Kuiper Belt in the outer part of our solar system, astronomers said today.

The disks were found in a survey of 22 Sun-like stars by the Hubble Space Telescope. By blocking out light from the central stars, Hubble was able to image dust and other material around the stars.

The stars are about 60 light-years away, and the shape of their disks have astronomers pondering the long-debated possibility that our own Sun might have an as-yet unfound companion dubbed Nemesis.

The scary part is that this dark partner, dubbed Nemesis, may well have been responsible for planet-wide disasters in the past. And we don't really know where it is now....

18:47 / 23.01.06

Has it not been suggested that Nemesis is responsible for sending a lot of comets into the inner solar system? Or am I channelling bad science fiction again?

18:48 / 23.01.06

And apologies Grant, having now actually read all the links you supplied I can see that it is a serious theory.

00:28 / 24.01.06

it's really called nemesis?

too awesome.

10:43 / 24.01.06

Fascinating link, thanks grant.

If it could be confirmed, it might allow us to predict periods where the chances of Earth being battered are increased. Perhaps giving us a bit of early warning on a dinosaur-killer?

02:34 / 25.01.06

Um... if this dark star is part of our solar system, how do we not know where it is? Wouldn't it be the second closest star to Earth? How do we lose a Sun?

15:11 / 25.01.06

Think about the planets as being like the ring around Saturn, and Nemesis as being one of Saturn's outer moons.

Nemesis, if I've got the right impression, would be a part of our solar system in the same way the comets and the Oort Cloud are part of the solar system -- something with a gravitational interaction with our sun, but not in a close orbit (thus creating the Kuiper Belt, which is sort of an asteroid belt out past Pluto).

And if it's that much dimmer than further-away stars (like Alpha Centauri, which doesn't have a gravitational interaction with our sun), then it's not going to be visible. We'd only know about it indirectly, from the things it did.

It doesn't have to be as big as our sun, either. I think Nemesis need only be a little bit more massive than Jupiter to count as a star.

03:17 / 27.01.06

(I think the figue is three times more massive than Jupiter, but I'm not sure. The line is crossed once it's massive enough to start thermonuclear reactions in the core.)

Biggest objection to an undiscovered object that huge is that the gravitational pertubations would have been noticed by now. I mean, thee times Jupiter's size is BIG. Jupiter's effect is taken into account when they plan trips anywhere in the solar system. If there was something even bigger, they'd have noticed it by now. (That said, there is an unexplained force operating on Pioneer, but I gather that's not a simple gravitational attraction.)

Until we get samples back, I guess there's no way to be sure, but the consensus, I thought, was that the Kuiper Belt is other coalesced bits of the original solar disk. Why would you need to assume a second star to explain it?