Subject:
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Re: The "geography" of local space
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.space
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Date:
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Thu, 4 Nov 1999 23:55:49 GMT
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Reply-To:
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jsproat@%SayNoToSpam%io.com
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Viewed:
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649 times
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Mr L F Braun wrote:
> Okay, Cygnus X-1 is out for the holiday vacation...next! (Then again, this
> doesn't preclude races or entities that aren't subject to carbon-water
> chemistry. Hal Clement wrote a nice essay about why H20-C (imagine
> subscript) chemistry is most likely, but you never can be sure...though I
> think silicon for all but artificial life is out.)
I remember a book called _The Dragon's Egg_ by Robert L. Forward. The ALFs in
that book are residents of a neutron star -- totally different chemistries
from H2O-C.
> Double and multiple systems are probably the rule, not the exception. Many
> astronomers (and not all "rogues" or weirdos) feel that the Sun may be or
> may once have been part of a multiple system. They call the extant
> iteration the "Nemesis Theory," for the name of this unseen, M5-or-fainter
> companion. I wasn't aware about the new dwarves, though--I presume they're
> M3 or less. Where are they?
Would that be Jupiter? I've heard theories one way and the other -- some say
it's too small to be a failed star or a brown dwarf, others say that that's
exactly what it is...
If Sol's significant other is really a very dim object far outside the orbit
of Pluto, wouldn't we detect its influence on orbits of planets, comets,
etc.? After all, we can detect far-off stars jiggling from the mass of their
own system of planets. How far out should it be before its mass has little to
no influence on the rest of the system? And wouldn't it lie within or near
the plane of the ecliptic, making its location easier to guess? Certainly we
might even be able to "see" it directly; it should emit *something*, right?
Then again, if it is way way way out there, past the Oort cloud, what's to say
that it doesn't have its own system of planets...?
Cheers,
- jsproat
--
Jeremy H. Sproat <jsproat@io.com> ~~~ http://www.io.com/~jsproat/
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Message is in Reply To:
 | | Re: The "geography" of local space
|
| Hey John (and all)- Astronomy is an armchair hobby? Well, I'm a historian (not done with the PhD just yet, but give me just a couple more years) who started out as a palaeontologist and astronomer--so I come at it from a different angle, but I've (...) (25 years ago, 4-Nov-99, to lugnet.space)
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