3 ms·

The Nemesis Hypothesis hasn't been debunked.

• dragonwriter 12y ago
  > The Nemesis Hypothesis hasn't been debunked. I rather thought that Nemesis had become a fairly untenable hypothesis in light of the the facts that: (1) Insofar as there is a periodicity to extinctions to explain (what Nemesis was posited to explain), more recent analysis has shown that it is too consistent for any plausible orbit for Nemesis, and (2) A sensitive enough survey to detect stars (including brown dwarfs) within the radius of Earth in which Nemesis would have to exist has been conducted and failed to detect any such star.
  • mangeletti 12y ago
    I'm not sure I understood point #1. Do you mean that the periodicity is too consistent to support the theory of an orbiting body, because an orbiting body would have a less consistent orbit? If so, that's very interesting. Pertaining point #2, I'm not very confident in any empirical data observed at this point in human evolution. It's not to say that scientists aren't working very hard to learn things, but moments like http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/26/found-a-black-hole-12-billion-times-the-size-of-the-sun http://www.theguardian.com/science/2015/feb/26/found-a-black... tell me that we're going to go through many more "we're absolutely sure / wait, we were wrong" moments, especially when pertaining astronomy and ontology, both fields with many more unknowns than true facts.