Invisible star 'shooting comets at Earth'

http://www.news.com.au/features/invisible-star-shooting-comets-at-earth/story-e6frflor-1225840140357

• Brown dwarf could have caused mass extinctions
• Star is invisible and a long way away
• But heat-seeking telescope may find it

AN invisible star responsible for the extinction of dinosaurs may be circling the Sun and causing comets to bombard the Earth, scientists said.

The brown dwarf - up to five times the size of Jupiter - could be to blame for mass extinctions that occur here every 26 million years, The Sun reports.
The star - nicknamed Nemesis by NASA scientists - would be invisible as it only emits infrared light and is incredibly distant. Nemesis is believed to orbit our solar system at 25,000 times the distance of the Earth to the Sun.
As it spins through the galaxy, its gravitational pull drags icy bodies out of the Oort Cloud - a vast sphere of rock and dust twice as far away as Nemesis.
These "snowballs" are thrown towards Earth as comets, causing devastation similar to the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
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Now NASA scientists believe they will be able to find Nemesis using a new heat-seeking telescope that began scanning the skies in January.
The Wide-Field Infrared Survey Explorer - expected to find a thousand brown dwarf stars within 25 light years of the Sun - has already sent back a photo of a comet possibly dislodged from the Oort Cloud.
Scientists' first clue to the existence of Nemesis was the bizarre orbit of a dwarf planet called Sedna. Scientists believe its unusual, 12,000-year-long oval orbit could be explained by a massive celestial body.
Mike Brown, who discovered Sedna in 2003, said: "Sedna is a very odd object - it shouldn't be there.
"The only way to get on an eccentric orbit is to have some giant body kick you - so what is out there?"
Professor John Matese, of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said most comets come from the same part of the Oort Cloud.
He added: "There is statistically significant evidence that this concentration of comets could be caused by a companion to the Sun.

 

Thanks for sharing that!

 

it's one theory of many. didn't warrant a press release (as the math isn't all in yet) but lately NASA is putting out press releases every time someone shits, in their attempt to justify their own existence. NASA has a unique way of doing things which is completely insane because of their close relationships with the government and industry.

 

indeed it is, and it annoys me that all the planet x/nibiru tards are coming full force out of the wood work screaming " i told you so, i told you so"

one does have to wonder the motives(and timing- given the solar flares/filaments/cmes/earthquakes) of this press release though wouldnt you say techie?

 

smoke jenkem

 

I don't know about that stuff, but it might have something to do with the fact that WISE was launched about 3 months ago, found its first near-earth asteroid about 2 months ago, and the first sets of survey images were released about a month ago.

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/WISE/main/index.html

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jenkem junkies 4 life!!!1!?2w2!

 

thats part of it.


would be nice if we could wrap it ALL up into that nice little package eh?!

 

Data that WISE will collect is sorely needed as far as sky surveys of IR objects go. Previous milestones were IRAS and COBE in the 80s whose spatial resolution and sensitivities were orders of magnitude less than WISE. There was another satellite similar to WISE that failed in the 90s before it had a chance to gather its data.

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WISE, and creating a supposition that will justify the money spent on WISE, and in effect, more money for more projects.

I should point out that NASA often renders several separate projects that are actually the same project for the sake of getting around regulations (some branches of nasa can only have one year, or five year projects, nothing in between, nothing longer term) so they cook the data (i.e. they'd be saying WISE was awesome to get more funding for the next phase of WISE)

 

Why not go far beyond shallow generality statements and claim that NASA conspired and purposely destroyed the WIRE satellite in 1999 so it could fund WISE.

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Forgot to mention for those of you interested in cosmology. Ned Wright is the PI for the WISE project. He maintains a good web page which elucidates many things in cosmology that usually aren't easy to grasp at first glance.

This is one of his pages summarizing analyses that have been done on the anisotropy of the CMB, which is sometimes called the echo of the Big Bang, based on data gathered from projects such as WMAP. The last two graphs are profound and the statistics aren't a fluke or cooked. They agree well with a Big Bang flat universe and one that contains only a few percent of ordinary matter. Other methods that are independent of this anisotropy analysis approach corroborate this. Things like this usually don't make the TV news because they aren't readily grasped by the general public and take some time to explain.

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/CMB-DT.html

A really crude acoustic analogy to those graphs would be the ability to measure the shape, size, and the contents of the room you are in based on an analysis of the echoes of sound in the room without being able to actually see the room. Imagine doing that on the universe and finding out what the universe is really like now and how it was long ago just after the Big Bang.

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There is only one way to save us now.



What could possibly go wrong.

 

because the loss of a satellite actually makes it harder to get funding for the next one (politicians like to say things like "how do we know this one won't be destroyed too?" even when they KNOW that it is unlikely, they will pretend to be stupid for the sake of getting what they want, instead of what is useful.


Aeronautics Innovation : NASA's Challenges and Opportunities

by Stephen A Merrill gives a good outline of the process and procedures, from an inside perspective. it's a common practice there

it comes from a culture that believes science produced by projects is more important than anything else, and sometimes they have to lie, or stretch the truth to accomplish that science, and that is accepted, and tolerated, because it is viewed, on an institutional level to be essential to NASA's continued operations

I am not suggesting it's immoral, or a conspiracy, or anything like that, it's just playing politics, with people who play politics, it's a game, and it leads to product like this press release.

 

I know. I was being sarcastic. Politics has a way of creeping into most things. The cold fusion incident back around the 1980s was a good example of 'science by press conference' when something was concluded without even trying to repeat or reproduce it.

In a way it's ok to promote the possibilities of what might be discovered by a new project, but incidents like the cold fusion press conference are far beyond that.

Other cases of political influence get even more bizarre, such as incidents where the White House was re-wording the EPA 9/11 air quality report.

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this may be the most informative thread to ever come out of RT....

the end nears....

 

I'm a jenkem addict. I'm addicted to the shit.

 

I better quit while I'm ahead. I don't want to get charged with 'substance abuse'.

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How can that star keep missing a big, fat target like us? Poor sight and coordination? Smokes too much weed?

 

In the astrological scope of things we are not that big and fat. I can think of a planet right past Mars that is much more bigger and fatter than us.