Search on for Death Star that throws out deadly comets..

Daily Telegraph ^ | March 13th, 2010

[TaraP]

Nasa scientists are searching for an invisible 'Death Star' that circles the Sun, which catapults potentially catastrophic comets at the Earth. The star, also known as Nemesis, is five times the size of Jupiter and could be to blame for the impact that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

The bombardment of icy missiles is being blamed by some scientists for mass extinctions of life that they say happen every 26 million years

Nemesis is predicted to lie at a distance equal to 25,000 times that of the Earth from the Sun, or a third of a light-year.

Astronomers believe it is of a type called a red or brown dwarf – a "failed star" that has not managed to generate enough energy to burn like the Sun.

But it should be detectable by a heat-sensitive space telescope called WISE, the Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer.

Launched last year, WISE began surveying the skies in January. It is expected to discover a 1000 brown dwarfs within 25 light-years of the Sun – right on our cosmic doorstep – before its coolant runs out in October.

[BlueDragon]

It turns out the bright "Nbiru image former" object that saturated the SOHO image above was Venus...

Interestingly enough, there is a [cough, cough] 'winged disk' object visible there at SOHO, now. It is the planet Mercury visible @;

SOHO, Pick of the week, suicide comets from March 15, this year. Ooh, the Ides of March, and all that jazz. Ceasar stabbed, then comets dumping themselves into the Sun. Ko-inkydink? Or just Kooky? Let the reader/viewer decide!

[BlueDragon]

What I find teasingly fascinating is in the textual commentary accompanying the images to the page(s) which we both linked to (the part that interests me the most, I'll underline for emphasis);

The SOHO spacecraft captured a very bright, sungrazing comet as it rocketed towards the Sun (Mar. 12, 2010) and was vaporized. This comet is arguably the brightest comet that SOHO has observed since Comet McNaught in early 2007. The comet is believed to belong to the Kreutz family of comets that broke up from a much larger comet many hundreds of years ago. They are known to orbit close to the Sun. A coronal mass ejection (CME) burst away from the Sun during the bright comet’s approach.

I'd swear there is a pattern. I've seen this many times at SOHO. One time in particular (a few years ago) the CME deflected a comet's tail. That particular comet didn't crash into the Sun like the other recent ones.

More info from same page;

Interestingly, a much smaller comet that preceded this one can be seen about half a day earlier on just about the identical route. And another pair of small comets followed the same track into the Sun after the bright one. Such a string of comets has never been witnessed before by SOHO. SOHO's C3 coronagraph instrument blocks out the Sun with an occulting disk; the white circle represents the size of the Sun. The planet Mercury can also be seen moving from right to left just beneath the Sun.

As far as the CME's go, I'm starting to wonder if there isn't an electrical charge that induces the CME. But then again, there are CME's when no comets are visible, too.

Thanks to SOHO, we do see a great many more small comets which had previously gone undetected.

The EIT 284 product shows them the best, to my own untrained eyes. EIT 284 latest image

[zeugma]

Great graphics!

Your post is a great place to hang a plug for what I consider to be one of the coolest programs I've ever seen: Celestia

From the Celestia homepage:

Welcome to Celestia

... The free space simulation that lets you explore our universe in three dimensions. Celestia runs on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Unlike most planetarium software, Celestia doesn't confine you to the surface of the Earth. You can travel throughout the solar system, to any of over 100,000 stars, or even beyond the galaxy.

All movement in Celestia is seamless; the exponential zoom feature lets you explore space across a huge range of scales, from galaxy clusters down to spacecraft only a few meters across. A 'point-and-goto' interface makes it simple to navigate through the universe to the object you want to visit.

Celestia is expandable. Celestia comes with a large catalog of stars, galaxies, planets, moons, asteroids, comets, and spacecraft. If that's not enough, you can download dozens of easy to install add-ons with more objects.

At the Celestia Motherload site, you can download add-ons for more detailed planetary textures, real spacecraft like Voyager I and II with their current positions, and also a huge number of fictional spacecraft as well. Apparently some folks have lots of spare time on their hands. :-)

[Fred Nerks]

http://www.archive.org/stream/earthupheaval010880mbp/earthupheaval010880mbp_djvu.txt

Excerpt:

And if we give credence to the records of earthquakes
in the chronicles of the ancient East and in those of the
classical age, we shall be amazed at the number of seismic
shocks and tremors. One example is the Babylonian rec-
ords on clay tablets stored in the library of Nineveh,
excavated by Sir Henry Layard; another is the Roman
records of a later age: in a single year during the Punic
Wars (217) fifty-seven earthquakes were reported in
Rome. 7

From all this it is apparent that seismic activity on our
planet subsided very quickly in intensity as well as in the
number of occurrences; and this again would point to a
stress or stresses that took place not so long ago: earth-
quakes are readjustments of the terrestrial strata, with
accompanying relief from the stress.

[TXnMA]

I agree. Celestia stays on my desktop. It is used often, when my granddaughters ask, "Granddad, What is that bright star we can see right over the treetops?"

Our front door looks right out on the eastern ecliptic -- so, usually it's a planet (Mars, lately...)

[zeugma]

One of the coolest features of Celestia IMO, is that it’s the first program that I’ve ever seen that really gives you a feel for the scale of space. Limit yourself to the speed of light, make a tour of the solar system and you’ll see what I mean. :-) I recently flew to Alpha Centauri at 1AU/sec. Even at a ridiculous speed like that, it still takes freaking forever!

[SunkenCiv]

What wendy said. :') KRONOS pubbed or repubbed two of his papers (S.K. Vsekhsvyatskii), "The Origin and Evolution of the Comets and Other Small Bodies in the Solar System" and "The Ring of Comets and Meteorites Encircling Jupiter".

Interesting idea gleeaikin; it seems more likely that bombardments of the Earth come from objects within the Solar System -- but that could easily result from knowing more about such objects. Smaller objects at greater distances are more difficult to detect, and almost all of those detected so far are in orbit around the Sun.

Rogue Planet Find Makes Astronomers Ponder Theory
by Maggie Fox
October 5, 2000

Eighteen rogue planets that seem to have broken all the rules about being born from a central, controlling sun may force a rethink about how planets form, astronomers said on Thursday... "The formation of young, free-floating, planetary-mass objects like these is difficult to explain by our current models of how planets form," Zapatero-Osorio said... They are not linked to one another in an orbit, but do move together as a cluster, she said... Many stars in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, may have formed in a similar manner to the Orion stars, she said. So there could be similar, hard-to-see planets floating around free near the Solar System.

first one an earlier topic about this, the rest just related sidebars:

• Earth under attack from an invisible star?
• Medieval Warm Period seen in western USA tree ring fire scars-3,000 yr Sequoias Fire History
• Comet-Kaze Strikes The Sun
• Star Predicted to Blast Through the Solar System
• We Are Doomed (in 1.5 million years)
• Orange Dwarf Star Set to Smash into The Solar System
• It's official: An asteroid wiped out the dinosaurs

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe ·

[SunkenCiv]

These are related (that's just MHO of course):

• Antarctic Glacier Has Five-story Blood-red Waterfall of Primordial Ooze
• 'Snowball Earth': Glaciers, ice packs once met at Equator
• Ice Once Covered the Equator
• Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide and Interglacial Warmth ( Youtube)
• Were Short Warm Periods Typical for Transitions to Glacial Epochs?
• Cold And Ice, Not Heat, Episodically Gripped Tropical Regions 300 Million Years Ago
• Geologists Look for Answers in Antarctica: Did Ice Exist at Equator Some 300 Million Years Ago?
• Snowball Earth: New Evidence Hints at Global Glaciation 716.5 Million Years Ago ( In the Yukon)

same here:

• Earth Raised Magnetic Shield Earlier than Thought
• What in the world is the SUN up to now? (Solar 'Current of Fire' Speeds Up)
• Study Peels Back More of the Magnetic Sun

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks Fred Nerks for the EiU.

I’m scratching my head over who sent this link, I really thought I had that info saved along with the file:

http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/Nemesis%20book/%20Nemesis1_files/filelist.xml

[SunkenCiv]

some oldies:

Nemesis: Does the Sun Have a 'Companion'?
by Robert Roy Britt
03 April 2001

Richard A. Muller... a physicist at University of California at Berkeley... [has] ideas... generally rooted in solid science and genius extrapolation... 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... 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... 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.

Searching for a Tenth Planet
by Jeff Kanipe
Oct 15 1999

The main justification for the search was made when discrepancies in the predicted positions of the outer planets Uranus and Neptune kept cropping up with alarming regularity. Uranus has completed over two and a half orbits since its discovery in 1741, and Neptune, discovered in 1846, has completed almost one full circuit. Both planets should have accurately determined orbits by now. And yet, variations in their predicted positions, called residuals, persist. Critics, most prominent among them, British astronomer Dr. Brian Marsden with the International Astronomical Union, say that inadvertent data error is the real culprit behind the residuals, not a missing planet. In fact, says Dr. Marsden, Planet X is not a scientific problem as much as it is a psychological problem...

In the October 11 issue of the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, Dr. John Murray, an astronomer from the Open University in the United Kingdom proposed that a large object in the extreme outer realms of the solar system may be gravitationally affecting the orbits of long-period comets. He theorizes that the object would have to orbit the sun 32,000 times farther away than Earth (about 3 trillion miles) and would have to be at least as massive as Jupiter, if not more so. Given its distance, it would also be extremely faint and slow moving.

In other research, a professor of physics at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, Dr. John J. Matese, is making a case for the existence of a 2- to 3-Jupiter mass object orbiting some 2.3 trillion miles from the sun. In a paper soon to be published in the planetary journal, Icarus, Dr. Matese asserts that this object, too, has created a "concentration" of Oort cloud comets and is responsible for sending a significant number of them - perhaps as much as 25 percent - into the inner solar system... Dr. Matese's theory focuses on different aspects of long-period comet orbits, but nevertheless begs the question: could the darkest corner of our solar system harbor a tenth planet or a brown dwarf? A brown dwarf, he contends, would not have been detected in the previous infrared searches, such as the one conducted by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) in the early 1980s, because the alleged planet/brown dwarf is too near the galactic plane. To ferret out such an object in that busy IR region requires greater sensitivity than IRAS possessed at the time.

A mystery revolves around the sun:
Researchers suggest that huge unseen object orbits on fringe of solar system
by Alan Boyle
Oct 7

Speculation about the existence of unseen celestial companions dates back far before the discovery of Pluto in 1929... This latest hypothesis, however, is aimed at answering nagging scientific questions about how particular types of comets make their way into the inner solar system. Some comets, like Halley's Comet, follow relatively short-period orbits - circling the sun in less than two hundred years. These comets are thought to originate in the Kuiper Belt, a disk of cosmic debris that lies beyond Neptune's orbit... Even further out is the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets surrounding the solar system at distances between 10,000 AU and more than 50,000 AU. That's where long-period comets such as Hale-Bopp are thought to come from. For some time, astronomers have noticed that the directional patterns of these comets are not completely random... No telescope has yet detected this object. But on the basis of its gravitational effect, John B. Murray, a planetary scientist at Britain's Open University, speculates that the object could be a planet larger than Jupiter, the biggest of the solar system's known planets... Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette say the object could be a planet or brown dwarf - that is, a dark, failed star - roughly three times the size of Jupiter and orbiting at 25,000 AU. The researchers, led by physicist John Matese, say their paper is to be published by the journal Icarus... Brian Marsden, who heads the International Astronomical Union's Central Bureau for Astronomical Telegrams as well as the Minor Planet Center at the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory... expressed some skepticism about the evidence behind the latest research... Matese noted that theories proposing a correlation between extinctions on Earth and celestial orbits had fallen out of scientific favor in recent years. But he said there could be a "much more gentle" effect that links periodic changes in cratering to the solar system's oscillating motion through the galactic plane.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks TaraP for posting this, and for the pings from all; this topic is duplicative of an earlier one that I'd pinged, but hey, X-Planets comes pretty close to be a neglected ping list, so I figure you appreciate the attention. :')

· join · view topics · view or post blog · bookmark · post new topic · subscribe ·

Google news searches: exoplanet · exosolar · extrasolar ·

[AntiKev]

Show me the calculations for the rest of the solar system that account for this mass.

[TXnMA]

Don't know if you have seen this video of the string of Kreutz comets impacting the sun,

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MY7H0PKeszQ

but, to me, it appears that the comet impacts appear to trigger CMEs -- which might not be too surprising...

~~~~~~~~~~~

BTW, TaraP, you can see Mercury at lower right, moving from right to left -- as a "winged orb 'Nbiru' object" imaging artifact...

[TXnMA]

Thanks! I’ll play around with that feature...

[SunkenCiv]

http://muller.lbl.gov/
http://muller.lbl.gov/images/crateringrates.gif
http://muller.lbl.gov/images/sep.GIF
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/crateringrates.htm
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-cr.htm
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-gc.htm
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/lbl-nem.htm
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/nemch1.htm
http://muller.lbl.gov/pages/nemfornem.htm
http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/explot.GIF
http://muller.lbl.gov/papers/figures%20for%20papers/fig2.gif
http://muller.lbl.gov/teaching/Physics10/Nemesis%20book/%20Nemesis1_files/Nemesis1.htm