Nemesis - Is the Sun a double star?

Writing this message led me to the terrifyingly stupid and unscientific message of ITAR-TASS , which, inter alia, stated: systems - they managed to calculate the location and orbit of an invisible planet, the existence of which was previously predicted by a number of leading physicists ” .

Where do the legs of this publication grow, what does nemesis mean and what have scientists really discovered / is trying to discover?


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First of all, I would like to point out the original message of NASA, from where the illiterate "journalist" got "information" - Getting WISE About Nemesis . Immediately indicate all the incorrectness in the paragraph above:

1. Nemesis - not an intriguing mystery
2. They are not looking for a planet, but a brown dwarf
3. Orbit not computed
4. Existence not proven
5. The “leading” physicists are a very limited list of people who were very cautious about the possible existence of a brown dwarf or planetoid, based on statistics and some anomalies (see below)

Brown dwarfs

Where do legs grow from? A number of stars (for example, Gliese 229) are double, while the second star is not exactly a star, but a so-called brown dwarf. The brown dwarf is a small star, inside which thermonuclear reactions take place, but they are quite small, so the star quickly loses energy and eventually turns into a planet-like object. On average, the masses of brown dwarfs range from 0.01 to 0.1 solar masses. In connection with the improvement of observational technology and the emergence of space telescopes, astronomers have noticed that many stars have similar “companions,” after which it was suggested that the Sun does not have a similar neighbor?

Project WISE and Nemesis

Actually, the story of Nemesis begins with this. As we can see, apart from the hypothetical statistical assumption, physics was not originally there. If a brown dwarf does exist, it should have a gravitational effect on celestial bodies. In particular, on the Oort cloud , since the space up to the Kuiper belt has already been studied quite well. Many comets appear just from this cloud, so a hypothetical nemesis should give deviations in the orbit of these same "tail".

There is also another interesting effect mentioned in the NASA article about the periodic change in the mass of the Earth (or more precisely, the gravitational field). It can be caused by both internal processes and external processes. Actually, in order to deal with the orbits of comets, which are sometimes very difficult to predict, and with the “mass defect” of the Earth, as well as with a number of other tasks, NASA launched the WISE project last year. Nemesis - as a popular addition to it, which is not the main goal of the project.

Anomalies in the Solar System

Recently, the dwarf planet Sedna was discovered, the orbit of which is strangely “extended”. According to a number of astronomers, this does not make sense, since approaching the Sun by Sedna is very rare (Sedna’s orbit is in the image below, the lower right square). Based on this, it was suggested that there is another gravitational source in the area of ​​the Oort cloud, due to the influence of which the eccentricity of the orbit is close to 0.9 (an elongated ellipse).



Professor John Matese of the University of Louisiana considers the existence of Nemesis possible for other reasons. It is known that comets from the Oort cloud come to us from the same area, which indicates a possible gravitational cause of this anomaly. According to his calculations, the size of a celestial body for proper effect should be about 3-5 masses of Jupiter. Some of his colleagues, for example, the “creator” of the term and ideas of Nemesis, Richard Muller from Berkeley, point to greater distances (1.5 light years) and masses (from 13 Jupiter masses).

Instead of conclusion

As we see, there are reasons for the existence of a mysterious planet. But they still exist "on paper", in the form of hypotheses that need to be tested. And the WISE project is the first step towards a further understanding of the structure of the solar system. Recently, however, the frequent publication of pseudoscientific information, issued for scientific. These are the “famous” filters of Petrik, and the reviving “torsion fields”, and the rejection of Darwin’s theory in the lessons of the foundations of Orthodox culture. All this contributes to the emergence of almost state charlatans, because they want to spend billions on the ill-fated filters. The first "calls" are already there: more than 70% of the population believe in astrology and the occult. If we want to continue to move in the direction of technical progress, it's time to learn how to separate the wheat from the chaff. And, above all, do not trust popular science publications of the media .

ps
A journalist who wrote a similar article in ITAR-TASS needs to be dismissed with a “wolf ticket”.

Acknowledgments

1. NASA
2. Astrobiology Journal
3. Images taken from the website of the journal Astrobiology and from wikipedia