The Time of Perihelion Passage and the Longitude of Perihelion of Nemesis
| Scientific Paper | |
|---|---|
| Title | The Time of Perihelion Passage and the Longitude of Perihelion of Nemesis |
| Read in full | Link to paper |
| Author(s) | Glen W Deen |
| Keywords | solar system, Nemesis, Nibiru, 12th Planet, Planet X |
| Published | 2008 |
| Volume | 5 |
| Number | 1 |
| No. of pages | 13 |
| Pages | 24-34 |
Read the full paper here
Abstract
If Nemesis, a hypothetical brown dwarf star, periodically passes through the inner solar system, it should have perturbed the orbits of the planets substantially, especially near times of perihelion passage. Yet almost no such perturbations have been detected. This can be explained if Nemesis is really comprised of two stars with complementary orbits such that their perturbing accelerations tend to cancel at the Sun. If these orbits are also inclined by 90°, the planet orbit changes could have been minimal even if acceleration cancellation was not perfect. This would be especially true for planets that were all on the opposite side of the Sun from Nemesis during the passage. With this in mind, a search was made for significant planet alignments. On July 5, 2079 Mercury, Earth, Mars+180°, and Jupiter will align at a mean polar longitude of 102.161°±0.206°. Nemesis A is expected to arrive 180° away at a perihelion longitude of 282.161°±0.206° and a perihelion distance of 3.971 AU, the Kirkwood 3/2 resonance with Jupiter at that time. On July 13, 2079 Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune+180° will align at a mean polar longitude of 299.155°±0.008°. Nemesis B is expected to arrive at that perihelion longitude and at a perihelion distance of 67.25 AU, outside the Kuiper Belt. The mass of Nemesis A has been estimated to be 2.545 Jupiter masses, and the mass of Nemesis B has been estimated to be 0.4325 solar mass. The ternary system of Sun, Nemesis A, and Nemesis B are apparently maverick members of a globular cluster of cold dark stars, and they orbit its center with a period of about 26,200 years and an eccentricity of about 0.009. The ecliptic longitude of the center of this cluster is about 258°, but the latitude has not been determined. This paper suggests that this orbit, not the presumed lunisolar torque, is the cause of the precession of the equinoxes as suggested by Walter Cruttenden. It also suggests that cold dark globular clusters, not recognized by conventional astronomers, have been misidentified as cosmic voids. In fact, there is a huge cosmic void located at that longitude and having a latitude of about +24°.
Overview
Glen W Deen presented this paper at the Natural Philosophy Alliance conference in Albuquerque on 9 April 2008. It is, in his own closing words, "merely an initial progress report on a line of research that could continue indefinitely" — and it is unusually explicit about which of its steps are assumptions, which are fits, and which are guesses. The starting problem is a genuine one for anybody attracted to the Nemesis hypothesis: a solar companion massive enough to trigger periodic comet showers ought to leave gravitational fingerprints on planetary orbits, and none have been found. Deen accepts the force of that objection and answers it structurally rather than by weakening the companion.
His solution is a ternary system. Nemesis is not one star but two — Nemesis A, a brown dwarf in the southern sky, and Nemesis B, a white dwarf in the northern — placed in near-polar orbits (inclination close to 90°) on opposite sides of the sky, so that "their gravitational forces at the Sun would cancel out over long periods of time." Residual perturbation is further suppressed if the planets happen to be on the far side of the Sun at each passage. From this the paper's method follows: if the planets must be opposite the intruder at perihelion, then tight planetary alignments become markers for the dates and longitudes of Nemesis passages, and Deen searches the ephemerides for them.
The scope then widens well beyond Nemesis. Deen proposes that the Sun and its two companions are "maverick members" of a globular cluster of a few hundred thousand cold, dark stars (the CDGC); that this cluster, not lunisolar torque, drives the precession of the equinoxes; that such clusters have been misidentified as cosmic voids; that the cosmic microwave background is the summed radiation of those dark stars; and — as a consequence of removing lunisolar torque — that the Earth is hollow.
The argument
Why Nemesis has not been seen
Deen offers three explanations and rejects one. The straightforward option is that telescopes have already imaged the components without recognising them, since an object heading almost straight at the Sun has very small proper motion; the objection he raises himself is that its annual parallax would then be larger than any known stellar parallax, and Hipparcos catalogued essentially every star brighter than 9th magnitude. The explanation survives only if both components are fainter than that. His more speculative option is gravitational lensing by the Sun, using a definition of a lens as "a spherical volume of space in which the speed of light is slower inside than outside", within which an object inside the focal distance cannot be imaged by a telescope focused at infinity. He extends this to claim that the Earth's lens produces what is called atmospheric refraction and the Sun's produces what is confused with stellar parallax. The third possibility — that both components are simply cold and dark — he rules out, because a stellar collision would have heated them.
The collision origin
The system's history is a single dramatic event. A Sirius-like binary with periapsis of order 1 AU and a period of tens of thousands of years evolved until the main-sequence star became a red giant larger than the periapsis distance; the white dwarf companion then "plowed through" it, blasting away perhaps 99.75% of its mass and leaving a brown-dwarf core of about 0.0025 solar mass (2.6 Jupiter masses). Roughly one solar mass of debris collapsed at the old barycentre to form the Sun. Nemesis A's heavy-element accretion disc supplied the rocky planets; Nemesis B's hydrogen-rich disc supplied the gas giants.
The cold dark globular cluster
Conventional astrophysics recognises only radiation as a stellar cooling mechanism. Deen proposes a stronger one: reverse beta decay of hydrogen into neutrons, absorbing about 0.782 MeV per neutron — the energy an ordinary free-neutron decay releases. Stars cooled this way settle near 2.7 K, and hundreds of thousands of them surrounding the Sun would explain both the uniformity of the CMB and, through the Sun's motion relative to them, its dipole anisotropy. The predicted test is stated plainly: a higher-resolution instrument such as ESA's Planck mission, at about 5 arcminutes, should resolve the CMB into hundreds of thousands of point sources. Cosmic voids, on this picture, are such clusters seen as spherical lenses that minify the background galaxies behind them — "hold a glass ball at arms length and look through it to see what I mean."
Fixing the parameters
Deen reduces the problem to a small number of free quantities and pins them one at a time. The acceleration of the Sun toward the cluster centre is set at 3.03792 km/day2 by iterating on the observed variation of the lunisolar precession rate; assuming a cluster mass of 144,000 solar masses then places its centre at 45,808 AU (0.7309 light year). Nemesis A's perihelion is assumed to lie at the Kirkwood 3/2 resonance with Jupiter, 3.9706 AU — chosen because that resonance, unlike the 2/1 and 3/1 gaps, is populated (by the Hilda group), which Deen explains by having Nemesis A stir the belt every ~24,000 years, faster than the ~100,000 years asteroids need to drift out of a resonance. The mass ratio mB/mA is assumed to be (5.2/0.39)2 = 178, on the reasoning that the original perihelia were at Mercury's and Jupiter's semi-major axes and the forces should cancel. The two survivors — Nemesis B's perihelion distance and one mass — were then adjusted with Microsoft Excel's Solver to match the target acceleration, giving 67.2547 AU, 2.545 Jupiter masses and 0.43253 solar masses.
The alignments
Scanning 2000–2200 CE in 0.05-year steps for minimum scatter in the planets' polar longitudes (true anomaly plus longitude of perihelion), Deen finds the best eight-planet grouping on 11 July 2079 at 291.4°±5.7°, with Mars and Neptune reversed by 180°. Refining, the inner planets tighten on 5 July 2079 — Mercury, Earth, Mars+180° and Jupiter at ±0.206°, with Venus dropped because its longitude error was 13.863° — and the outer planets on 13 July 2079, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune+180° reaching "an astonishing minimum of ±0.008°". Nemesis A is assigned the first date and Nemesis B the second. Deen is candid about the logic: "I know of no physical reason why planet alignments should have anything to do with the times of perihelion passages of Nemesis A or B," and adds "I prefer to imagine that these orbits were designed by an intelligent designer ... Whether my idea concerning an intelligent designer is true or not does not matter. What matters is that it is proving to be useful."
For past passages he uses a different marker. If the Sun suddenly gains mass, previously circular orbits become eccentric with the planets' current polar longitudes becoming their aphelion longitudes; if it loses mass, they become perihelion longitudes. Assuming a matter transfer onto the Sun at the last passage, he looks back for aligned aphelia and finds candidate dates around 20617 BCE and 21355 BCE, while conceding these minima "are really too broad over time to be precise indicators."
Hollow Earth and precession
If the Sun's orbit about the cluster produces the precession of the equinoxes, then lunisolar torque cannot also produce it. Deen's escape is that the Earth is a hollow shell of uniform thickness, whose equatorial bulge is therefore mass-symmetric and torque-free — so Newton's theory is "not wrong; it is simply not applicable." He supports this by noting that the drop in longitudinal seismic velocity from 13.7 to 8 km/s at the core-mantle boundary gives a ratio of 1.71, only 9% above π/2 = 1.57, the extra path length waves would travel if they ran around the inside of a domed cavity rather than through a filled core; and by citing the known tension between the Earth's moment of inertia and self-compression density models.
Assessment
The paper's honesty is its most attractive feature, and it is not a trivial virtue. Deen labels his assumptions as assumptions, admits that Simon's ephemerides are being extrapolated far outside their intended range ("we cannot place much faith in the results of this section"), records an oversight in his own precession integration, and closes with a list of specific, checkable predictions rather than a claim of proof: find two faint high-parallax stars in opposite hemispheres, one white dwarf and one brown dwarf; compute the CMB dipole independently and match COBE; have Planck resolve the CMB into point sources. That is the structure of a research programme rather than an assertion. The core dynamical insight — that a symmetric pair could cancel at the Sun where a single companion could not — is also a legitimate response to the strongest objection against Nemesis, and it is the sort of move a careful sceptic would think of.
The method, however, cannot support the weight placed on it. Deen concedes there is no physical reason connecting planetary alignments to Nemesis perihelia and then uses them as the paper's central data anyway, justified by an appeal to design. The alignments themselves are constructed with too many discretionary choices to carry information: Venus is dropped because it "spoils the near perfection", Mars and Neptune are reversed by 180° after the fact, and the planets are partitioned into inner and outer groups when a single grouping does not tighten. Given free choice of which planets to include and which to flip, an "alignment" of essentially arbitrary tightness can be produced from any epoch, and the celebrated ±0.008° is a property of that selection rather than a measurement. The parameter fitting is likewise circular at the crucial point: the target acceleration is derived from the precession model that the CDGC hypothesis is meant to replace, and the two remaining free parameters are then solved to reproduce it.
The paper is also internally inconsistent about its headline number. The abstract places the four-planet alignment at 102.161° and Nemesis A "180° away" at 282.161°; Section 4 and Figure 4 place Nemesis A's perihelion at 102.161° and describe "my four-planet alignment of 282.161°". Both values appear for both objects, and nothing in the text resolves which is intended.
Against measurement the difficulties are severe. Deen's own stated acceleration of 3.03792 km/day2 converts to 4.1 × 10-7 m/s2, roughly two thousand times the Sun's centripetal acceleration about the galactic centre (about 2 × 10-10 m/s2); an unseen 144,000 solar masses within 0.73 light year would dominate solar system and Oort cloud dynamics and would leave Proxima Centauri, at 4.22 light years, far outside a cluster it should belong to. The CMB test he proposed has been performed and answered against him: Planck resolved no population of point sources, and COBE-FIRAS had already shown the spectrum to be a blackbody to about one part in 105, which a superposition of hundreds of thousands of discrete 2.7 K stellar sources at differing distances and velocities would not reproduce. Direct searches have also closed the object itself: the WISE all-sky infrared survey excludes any Saturn-mass or larger body within 10,000 AU of the Sun, and a 0.43 solar mass white dwarf at 67 AU perihelion would have been among the brightest infrared sources in the sky. The brown-dwarf classification is also mistaken on standard definitions — the deuterium-burning limit is about 13 Jupiter masses (roughly 0.012 solar mass), not the 0.002 solar mass Deen quotes, so a 2.545 Jupiter-mass object is a planet, not a star.
Two mechanisms are asserted without the physics that would make them work. Reverse beta decay (p + e− → n + ν) is indeed endothermic at 0.782 MeV, but it is not available at stellar surface temperatures — 2.7 K corresponds to an energy some ten orders of magnitude too small — and the free neutrons produced decay back in about fifteen minutes, returning the energy; it is a cycle, not a heat sink. The hollow Earth proposal conflicts not with one measurement but with the elementary one: the Earth's mean density is 5.51 g/cm3 against roughly 2.7–3.3 g/cm3 for crust and mantle rock, which requires a dense core, and the planet's free oscillation spectrum after large earthquakes matches a filled radial density profile mode by mode.
Read as a speculative synthesis presented to a conference by an author who says openly that he is at "the first step", the paper is engaging and unusually self-aware about its own weaknesses. Read as evidence for a solar companion, it demonstrates only that a sufficiently flexible alignment search will find whatever alignment is sought.