Do we live in a binary solar system?
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"The trouble with most folks isn't so much their ignorance. It's know'n so many things that ain't so." -- A favorite quote of Richard A. Muller, by 19th century humorist Josh Billings.
When you think big, as Richard A. Muller does, you're bound to create ideas now and then that are so compelling you just can't let go of them -- ideas so outlandish that mainstream scientists are equally eager to dismiss them.
Muller, a physicist at University of California at Berkeley, has had his share of big ideas.
If you don't count the restaurant he owned between 1976 and 1982 ("If anyone near and dear to you wants to open a restaurant, I can now be hired to talk them out of it."), Muller's ideas are generally rooted in solid science and genius extrapolation. He's got a gaggle of prestigious awards to prove it, with titles that say things like "outstanding" and "highly original."
But Muller's biggest idea is a real Nemesis. Or so he claims.
Like a thorn in the side of mainstream researchers, Muller's Nemesis theory -- that our Sun has a companion star responsible for recurring episodes of wholesale death and destruction here on Earth -- seems to reemerge periodically like microbes after a mass extinction.
It's a theory that has many detractors. And it's a theory that has been beaten down and left for dead in the minds of most scientists.
Yet it is a theory that just won't die.
Nemesis is cautiously supported by a handful of scientists, who often sound like ringside rooters eager for a victory but thankful they don't have to put the gloves on. Muller meanwhile acknowledges the possibility that the whole idea could turn out to be wrong, but he is nonetheless confident that Nemesis will be found within 10 years.
"Give me a million dollars and I'll find it," Muller said in a recent telephone interview.
Brave words for a bold theory that if proven true would shake up everything we know about the formation and evolution of our solar system.
Genesis of Nemesis
Muller's idea for Nemesis came to him 1983. Luis Alvarez, then an emeritus professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley, and his son Walter had recently put forth the theory that a giant impact had wiped out the dinosaurs. (This idea, like so many others that are now widely accepted, met with staunch criticism when it was introduced because it, too, was not mainstream).
Around the same time, two other researchers had suggested yet another controversial idea, that mass extinctions occurred at regular intervals -- every 26 million years or so. Scientists immediately folded the ideas into a new and breathtaking possibility: Impacts by space rocks were causing massive global species destruction every 26 million years.
Luis Alvarez was Richard Muller's mentor, and he suggested that Muller try to debunk the periodicity argument. Pondering this, Muller dreamed up the fanciful companion to the Sun as a possible cause, and with Berkeley's Piet Hut and Marc Davis of Princeton, worked out the details.
Muller gave the object the name of the Greek goddess of retribution -- fitting for a killer star that roamed stealthily beyond the solar system flicking comets at dinosaurs.
In the end, the idea looked surprisingly plausible to Muller and his colleagues, and the results of their work were ultimately published in the journal Nature in 1984. Muller then wrote a book about Nemesis, and he has pursued the companion star, while also doing other research, ever since.
Tossing comets at us
Nemesis, as Muller sees it, is a common red dwarf star that would be visible through binoculars or a small telescope, if only we knew which of some 3,000 stars to look at. These are stars that have been cataloged, but their distances are not known.
Any one of them could be the Death Star, as Nemesis has come to be called by some.
Red dwarfs are the most common stars in the galaxy. They are small and relatively cool, dimmer than our Sun. The notion of companion stars is also exceedingly common -- more than half of all stars are part of such a binary system, in which two stars are thought to form out of a single cloud of gas and dust.
Binary stars settle into a gravitational dance around a common point in space. The smaller of the two stars does most of the orbiting, whereas the larger one is much closer to the center of the dance routine. It's like two kids on a seesaw. For the thing to work properly, the heavier child must sit closer to the center of the apparatus.
Muller figures Nemesis' orbit ranges from 1 to 3 light-years away from the Sun.
On its closest approach, the lethal companion would pass through a vast, but sparsely populated halo of primitive comets called the Oort Cloud, which surrounds our solar system from beyond Neptune's orbit out to nearly a light-year away. (The Sun's nearest known star, Proxima Centauri, is about 4.25 light-years away).
During this passage through or near the Oort Cloud, the gravity of Nemesis would scatter a furious storm of primordial comets that had been relatively undisturbed for 4.5 billion years, since the solar system came into being.
Dislodged from their once-stable orbits, millions or billions of these comets would travel to the inner solar system over millions of years, pulled toward the Sun by its gravity. A handful would run into Earth along the way, and the flurry of would result in mass extinctions.
Simple enough. But Nemesis has for years been dogged by a misunderstanding, Muller says. Most researchers think the theory was long ago dismissed by competing data that claimed its orbit was not possible.
well, presumably it should have no generalisable effects, that is to say obviously it makes a difference whether or not we orbit Sirius or a point between both stars, but the difference is not cool.
Woah that is so cool! I took Astronomy and learned about binary systems so I though you were joking but then I looked at this website and turns out you are WAY smarter than me! I would say that Sirius might have life on it's planets and then we wouldn't feel alone in the universe and maybe bring about world peace only to fight with the newcomers. Oh and Sirius in the Harry Potter books just went to visit his star and will be back in the last book so the whole franchise won't be dumb after all. You should read Factoring Humanity you might like it, even though I didn't.
http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/eviden...
http://www.spacedaily.com/news/extrasola...
Nice question.
All taken into consideration, we live in a binary solar syatem.
A binary system is one that has two stars in the same solar system the stars share the gravitational forces in such a way that the solar system works within this area . What you are hypothesizing does not conform to a true Binary solar system configuration.
Interesting point, but it is also true that every star has a gravitational influence (however small) on every other star. In that respect, I suppose you could argue that our galaxy is one enormous multi-star system orbiting our galaxy's center of gravity.
But that's obvious getting tedious. It's much simpler and neater to treat our sun and the various objects orbiting it as its own solar system, while a binary star system would apply only to two stars with a strong gravitational influence on each other.
Sirius is 8.8 lightyears away. If the Sun were part of such a system, the orbital time would not be a mere 24,000 years, it would measure in the hundreds of millions. However, Sirius is a binary, its companion is a white dwarf weighing 95% of the Sun's mass, but slightly smaller than Earth. It takes 49.98 years to orbit Sirius.
Another reason why the Sun cannot orbit Sirius is that there are quite a few stars closer to us than Sirius is: Alpha Centauri (which is a system of 3 stars), Barnard's Star, Luyten 728-6 (two stars), and others.
What's so special about Sirius anyway? It happens currently to be the brightest star as seen from Earth. Big deal. Canopus is the second brightest, and in 300,000 years will be the brightest for a few millenia.
The 12 hour method of measuring day and night is an accident of our having inherited a system invented by the Babylonians. It has no special inherent value or significance. The same is true for the number of months in a year, which derives from the length of time the Moon takes to go through its phases. If Martians tried inventing a calendar based on their moons they would have a much more complicated system (or Jupiter, with 63 moons!).
no
You make no sense. A binary solar system refers to a system that has two stars within its system. Our system has only one star. Sirius is another star system and we are not rotating around it.
The answer to the question in the additional text is no. In addition, an orbit with a radius measured in light-years would have a period way in excess of 24,000 years.
As to your first question, maybe. If a companion star existed, it would probably be an M-class star just massive enough to not be classified as a brown dwarf. Its orbit would probably be on the order of light-days so as to stay within the gravitational influence of the Sun and not be pulled away by the Alpah Centauri system or other close stars.
A companion star is one of the bases for the Nemesis theory that posits a close approach of the star into the Oort Cloud causes periodic comet bombardment of the inner Solar System. So far, however, there has been no published indications that such a companion has been found.
Be careful not to collapse one's thinking into illusory correlations. The concept of "binary stars" is a large one to contemplate, for sure, but there are certain connotations behind all that.
Binary stars revolve around their centre of mass which our sun, Sol, clearly does not do with any other star. Most binaries consist of a massive star and a much smaller one though this isn't a hard and fast rule.
Any planet orbiting a typical binary star system would be inherently unstable due to the uneven tidal forces acting on it. In those cases, life as we understand it, is exceedlingly unlikely if not impossible.
I'm afraid your arithmetic observations are completely irrelevant to your question. Temporal cycles of days, years, months et cetera have absolutely no bearing on anything. Our solar system is currently hurtling towards the star Vega but that doesn't mean anything at all.
I wonder if your reference to a "24,000 year cycle..." isn't to do with precession of the Earth's axis.
Fially, human physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual development have nothing to do with science fiction and everything to do with the universe within.
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