Sun companion?

[zoneca]

What do you think about the issue that our sun has its companion? Unbelievable there's such theory. Pretty scarry for me to think about it.

[John]

What do you think about the issue that our sun has its companion? Unbelievable there's such theory. Pretty scarry for me to think about it.

Why scary ? - as you say, it's unbelievable. There are all sorts of daft theories about - the trick is not to believe them !

We can now detect planet sized objects around other stars, many light years away. If the Sun really did have a companion, we would have known about it a long time ago.

[sologuitarist61]

I think this idea came about because of the repeated catastrophes that have struck the earth - ice ages, meteor strikes and so on. I believe that someone sat down and decided that these happened at regular intervals and then looked for something that might have caused them. They then came up with the idea that the Earth is part of a double star system with the 'partner' star being very tiny and not particularly luminous and that this star was in an eccentric orbit that took it far awat (present time) and therefore hard to see, and then swings in very closely to caused the disturbances noted on Earth.

It is a oretty unlikely scenario and we would surely have noticed its movement against the back ground stars by now, but then a lot of ideas seems very far fetch at the outset, but are later proved to be right. So there was nothing intrinsicly wrong with the idea, but I feel this one will never be proved right. Unless of course the companion happens to be an unseeable mini black hole

[michael.h.f.wilkinson]

The theory was essentially blown out of the water by several infrared satellites, who would have picked up a brown dwarf orbiting the sun easily. A black hole is similarly unlikely, because if it is massive enough to cause disturbances on earth, it should at the very least show up by its gravitational lensing.