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NEMESIS - Part 1 of 4

michel franco schrieb/wrote/a écrit:

> I have read "ROCKS FROM SPACE" some time ago and discovered the
> NEMESIS theory in it. NEMESIS is a possible red dwarf companion star
> of our Sun. It would have a 26 - 28 million years period to roud the
> Sun.

> Richard Norton wrote: "The tedious search continues. Muller's group
> is using automated telescopes to survey thousands of faint, red dwarf
> stars at intervals of 6 months ... We should know in the near future
> if Nemesis does exist."

> I wish to know where I can found more about this incredible theory.


Bonjour Michel, hello List!

WEISSMAN P.R. (1990) Are Periodic Bombardments Real? (Sky & Telescope,
March 1990, 266-270) - The Death Star, pp. 267-269:

Early in 1984 two different mechanisms were suggested to explain the
alleged periodicity. The first was put forth by Daniel Whitmire
(University of Southwest Louisiana) and Albert Jackson (Computer
Sciences Corp.), and independently by Marc Davis, Piet Hut, and Richard
Muller (all colleagues of the Alvarezes at Berkeley). They proposed that
the Sun has a small, faint companion star, dubbed Nemesis, in a distant
orbit with a period of 26 million years.
If the attendant star's orbit is eccentric enough, it would spend most
of its time outside the Oort cloud, the swarm of several trillion comets
that surrounds the solar system. But every 26 million years the
companion would pass through perihelion, its point of closest approach
to the Sun, and cut a path deep into the cloud. The dwarf's gravity
would perturb the orbits of many comets and send a shower of some 100
million of these objects into the inner solar system to bombard Earth
and the other planets. One result of this commotion might be a massive
biological extinction.
The number of comets in a shower could be enhanced greatly if the solar
system also possesses an inner Oort cloud, closer to the Sun than the
main concentration but still well beyond Pluto. The existence of such a
large, hidden source of comets was first suggested by astronomer, Jack
Hills (Los Alamos National Laboratory) in 1981.
Given a billion Earth-crossing comets cascading in from the inner Oort
cloud, about 20 large ones and many more smaller ones would be expected
to strike Earth over an interval of 2 to 3 million years. A mass
extinction might result if the cumulative effect of many impacts was
enough to disrupt our planet's climate. However, Piet Hut and I, using a
computer model of the dynamical evolution of a comet shower, estimate
that the average time between major impacts would be about 100,000 years
- long enough for Earth to recover between events. More likely, among
the 20 or so large impactors would be one very large comet, perhaps 10
to 15 km in diameter, which could trigger the extinction by itself.

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