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Our Solar System might have a Brown Dwarf...

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(@darrell-andrews)
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Found this interesting:

http://news.blogs.cnn.com/2011/02/15/scientists-telescope-hunt-massive-hidden-object-in-space/?hpt=C2

You would think that our Voyager probes would have seen it already, or maybe Hubble.

 
Posted : February 15, 2011 4:25 pm
(@sicilian-cowboy)
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It's probably just the Death Star......

 
Posted : February 15, 2011 5:49 pm
(@paul-in-pa)
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I Go With Nemesis

It may well be a neutron star and the odds are even that the sun circles it or it circles the sun. A highly elliptical orbit, in the order of millions of years.

Paul in PA

 
Posted : February 15, 2011 5:50 pm
 sinc
(@sinc)
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I Go With Nemesis

> the odds are even

Interesting odds, considering that there are extremely long odds that such a body even exists.

The only reason people are saying that there might be such an object is that they're trying to explain a supposed 27-million year extinction cycle. But any body that orbits the sun every 27 million years would have to be so far out that it would have an extremely unstable orbit, varying widely in how long it took to orbit, due to the effects of other stars passing nearby. So there are considerable problems with the theory that such a body could explain a regular 27-million-year cycle, even if it should become clear that there really is a 27-million-year extinction cycle (which is still a point of contention).

 
Posted : February 15, 2011 10:31 pm
(@joe-nathan)
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Two of our local Physics professors making the news:

...Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette think data from NASA's infrared space telescope WISE will confirm Tyche's existence and location within two years....

 
Posted : February 16, 2011 6:50 am
 RFB
(@rfb)
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Tyche is supposed to be a planet, not a sun.

LINK

:sun:

 
Posted : February 16, 2011 7:28 am