Is there an unknown companion to the Sun?

Is there a hidden companion to the sun? This idea sounds old-fashioned but now scientists think an object larger than Jupiter, may be orbiting on the edge of our solar system. This article is from Wired--I usually try to edit stuff out of these posts, so that it looks like fair use, but really, all the info seems distinct and important. Of course there are good reasons to visit the site that originated the news below. For one thing, a wonderful picture shows the Oort Cloud is outside the solar system, (what!!) so I may have really confused some stuff.
Check it out.

A century of comet data suggests a dark, Jupiter-sized object is lurking at the solar system’s outer edge and hurling chunks of ice and dust toward Earth.

“We’ve accumulated 10 years more data, double the comets we viewed to test this hypothesis,” said planetary scientist John Matese of the University of Louisiana. “Only now should we be able to falsify or verify that you could have a Jupiter-mass object out there.”

In 1999, Matese and colleague Daniel Whitmire suggested the sun has a hidden companion that boots icy bodies from the Oort Cloud, a spherical haze of comets at the solar system’s fringes, into the inner solar system where we can see them.

In a new analysis of observations dating back to 1898, Matese and Whitmire confirm their original idea: About 20 percent of the comets visible from Earth were sent by a dark, distant planet.

This idea was a reaction to an earlier notion that a dim brown dwarf or red dwarf star, ominously dubbedNemesis, has pummeled the Earth with deadly comet showers every 30 million years or so. Later research suggested that mass extinctions on Earth don’t line up with Nemesis’s predictions, so many astronomers now think the object doesn’t exist.

“But we began to ask, what kind of an object could you hope to infer from the present data that we are seeing?” Matese said. “What could possibly tickle [comets'] orbits and make them come very close to the sun so we could see them?”

Rather than a malevolent death star, a smaller and more benign companion called Tyche (Nemesis’s good sister in Greek mythology) could send comets streaming from the Oort Cloud toward Earth.

The cosmic snowballs that form the hearts of comets generally hang out in the Oort Cloud until their orbits are nudged by some outside force. This push could come from one of three things, Matese says. The constant gravitational pull of the Milky Way’s disk can drag comets out of their icy homes and into the inner solar system. A passing star can shake comets loose from the Oort Cloud as it zips by. Or a large companion like Nemesis or Tyche can pull comets out of their comfort zones.

Computational models show that comets in each of these scenarios, when their apparent origins are mapped in space, make a characteristic pattern in the sky.

“We looked at the patterns and asked, ‘Is there additional evidence of a pattern that might be associated with a passing star or with a bound object?’” Matese said.

After examining the orbits of more than 100 comets in the Minor Planet Center database, the researchers concluded that 80 percent of comets born in the Oort Cloud were pushed out by the galaxy’s gravity. The remaining 20 percent, however, needed a nudge from a distant object about 1.4 times the mass of Jupiter.

“Something smaller than Jovian mass wouldn’t be strong enough to do the deed,” Matese said. “Something more massive, like a brown dwarf, would give a much stronger signal than the 20 percent we assert.”

There’s one problem, however. The pattern only works for comets that come from the spherical outer Oort Cloud, which extends from about 0.3 to 0.8 light-years from the sun. Comets from the flatter, more donut-shaped inner Oort Cloud don’t create the same distinctive pattern.

“That’s troubling,” Matese said. “It requires an entirely new dynamical explanation for how inner Oort Cloud comets are made observable.”...

“I think this whole issue will be resolved in the next 5 to 10 years, because there’s surveys coming on line … that will dwarf the comet sample we have today,” he said. “Whether these types of asymmetries in the directions that comets are coming from actually do exist or not will definitely be hammered out by those surveys.”

We may not have to wait that long, Matese says. An object like Tyche could be seen directly by WISE, NASA’s infrared space telescope.
“We anticipate that this WISE is going to falsify or verify our conjecture,” he said. “We just have to be patient.”

Images: 1) Comet Sliding Spring, a visitor from the Oort Cloud, was captured by WISE in Jan. 2010. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/UCLA 2) The layout of the solar system, including the Oort Cloud, on a logarithmic scale. Credit: NASA


S

Miniature galaxy with miniature black hole

The link here is to an article about what scientists are calling a galaxy within a galaxy. This phenomena (and perhaps it's location)  allows them to study features more common in the early universe. But I cannot relay it reliably, here are parts of the article, and you want to see the picture at the original article.

Following a study of what is in effect a miniature galaxy buried inside a normal-sized one - like a Russian doll - astronomers using a CSIRO telescope have concluded that massive black holes are more powerful than we thought.

An international team of astronomers led by Dr Manfred Pakull at the University of Strasbourg in France has discovered a 'microquasar' - a small black hole, weighing only as much as a star, that shoots jets of radio-emitting particles into space.

Called S26, the black hole sits inside a regular galaxy called NGC 7793, which is 13M light-years away in the Southern constellation of Sculptor.

Earlier this year Pakull and colleagues observed S26 with optical and X-ray telescopes...
Now they have made new observations with CSIRO's Compact Array radio telescope near Narrabri, NSW. These show that S26 is a near-perfect analogue of the much larger 'radio galaxies' and 'radio quasars'. ...

Powerful radio galaxies and quasars are almost extinct today, but they dominated the earlyUniverse, billions of years ago, like cosmic dinosaurs. They contain big black holes, billions of times more massive than the Sun, and shoot out huge radio jets that can stretch millions of light-years into space.

Astronomers have been working for decades to understand how these black holes form their giant jets, and how much of the black hole's energy those jets transmit to the gas they travel through. That gas is the raw material for forming stars, and the effects of jets on star-formation have been hotly debated.

"Measuring the power of black hole jets, and therefore their heating effect, is usually very difficult," said co-author Roberto Soria (University College London)...
"With this unusual object, a bonsai radio quasar in our own backyard, we have a unique opportunity to study the energetics of the jets."
Using their combined optical, X-ray and radio data, the scientists were able to determine how much of the jet's energy went into heating the gas around it, and how much went into making the jet glow at radio wavelengths.

They concluded that only about a thousandth of the energy went into creating the radio glow.

"This suggests that in bigger galaxies too the jets are about a thousand times more powerful than we'd estimate from their radio glow alone," said Dr Tasso Tzioumis of CSIRO Astronomy and Space Science.

"That means that black hole jets can be both more powerful and more efficient than we thought, and that their heating effect on the galaxies they live in can be stronger."
...
Publication: Roberto Soria, Manfred W. Pakull, Jess W. Broderick, Stephane Corbel, and Christian Motch. "Radio lobes and X-ray hotspots in the microquasar S26." In press in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. Available online on the MNRAS website and at http://arxiv.org/abs/1008.0394.

Is the ergot theory of witches behavior diminished?

This gem was in a blog called neurophilosophy. (Don't get excited the guy has no idea what philosophy is).
We quote a regular but unnamed blogger.


"ON August 15th, 1951, an outbreak of hallucinations, panic attacks and psychotic episodes swept through the town of Pont-Saint-Esprit in southern France, hospitalizing dozens of its inhabitants and leaving five people dead. Doctors concluded that the incident occurred because bread in one of the town's bakeries had been contaminated with ergot, a toxic fungus that grows on rye. But according to investigative journalist Hank Albarelli, the CIA had actually dosed the bread with d-lysergic acid diethylamide-25 (LSD), an extremely potent hallucinogenic drug derived from ergot, as part of a mind control research project"

Moon's formation puzzling

No author listed for this writeup about puzzling features of the moon's current geography. The article is excerpted below and the full article is at this link. The article mentions that further mysteries remain.

Source: University of California Santa Cruz

http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=32051
Posted Thursday, November 11, 2010

A bulge of elevated topography on the farside of the Moon -- known as the lunar farside highlands -- has defied explanation for decades. But a new study led by researchers at theUniversity of California, Santa Cruz, shows that the highlands may be the result of tidal forces acting early in the Moon's history when its solid outer crust floated on an ocean of liquid rock.

Ian Garrick-Bethell, an assistant professor of Earth and planetary sciences at UC Santa Cruz, found that the shape of the Moon's bulge can be described by a surprisingly simple mathematical function. "What's interesting is that the form of the mathematical function implies that tides had something to do with the formation of that terrain," said Garrick-Bethell, who is the first author of a paper on the new findings published in the November 11 issue of Science.

The paper describes a process for formation of the lunar highlands that involves tidal heating of the Moon's crust about 4.4 billion years ago. At that time, not long after the Moon's formation, the crust was decoupled from the mantle below it by an intervening ocean of magma. As a result, the gravitational pull of the Earth caused tidal flexing and heating of the crust. At the polar regions, where the flexing and heating was greatest, the crust became thinner, while the thickest crust would have formed in the regions in line with the Earth.

This process still does not explain why the bulge is now found only on the farside of the Moon. "You would expect to see a bulge on both sides, because tides have a symmetrical effect," Garrick-Bethell said. "It may be that volcanic activity or other geological processes over the past 4.4 billion years have changed the expression of the bulge on the nearside."

The paper's coauthors include Francis Nimmo, associate professor of Earth and planetarysciences at UCSC, and Mark Wieczorek, a planetary geophysicist at the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris. The researchers analyzed topographical data from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and gravitational data from Japan's Kaguya orbiter.

A map of crustal thickness based on the gravity data showed that an especially thick region of the Moon's crust underlies the lunar farside highlands. ...

The mathematical function that describes the shape of the Moon's bulge can account for about one-fourth of the Moon's shape, he said. Although mysteries still remain, such as what made the nearside so different, the new study provides a mathematical framework for further investigations into the shape of the Moon.

"It's still not completely clear yet, but we're starting to chip away at the problem," Garrick-Bethell said.

Women and Crime: Problem Solving Techniques

A woman in Erie Pennsylvania has just been convicted of bank robbery. She is already in jail for murdering her husband.  This woman planned, and persuaded 5 men to participate in, a bank robbery which netted a little more than 8,000 dollars.  She wanted the money to put out a hit on her father-in-law.  The woman's name is Marjorie Diehl-Armstrong. She is 61, so she must have been in her mid-fifties when all this happened. You have to look at the link. This is because you have to see the pictures of these people.  (And I am getting nervous about how much I quote of articles in this blog.) Here's that link again:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1325749/Marjorie-Diehl-Armstrong-guilty-pizza-delivery-bomb-plot-death-man-blew-heist.html
And one other thing:-- the headline mentions her "bizarre plot." I didn't even describe that in my comments.