Is the Sun a binary?

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by nemesis</i>
<br /><hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">You start with a nice description of precession. But then things start to turn murky. I realize that much of this is Cruttenden's material, not yours. But if you plan to be an advocate, you should get your facts straightened out.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">This seeming "wobble" of the Earth's pole has historically been attributed to the gravity of the Sun, and especially the Moon, acting on the Earth's equitorial bulge. This is supposed to cause the pole to shift clockwise by the observable amount each year. It's referred to as the "lunisolar theory" of precession and has been generally accepted because there is no alternative.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">This has been generlly accepted because it is required by ordinary gravitational physics. The Earth is an oblate planet, flattened by about 0.3%. When one applies a torque to any spinning body, the result is precession. And the gravitational tide-raising forces of the Sun and Moon are applying torques to the spinning Earth with a strength that gives close to the observed lunisolar precession rate by direct calculation, even if precession had not been observed. Moreover, there is an additional component called "planetary precession" that slowly mpves the plane of the ecliptic because of planetary perturbations on the Earth.

So if there were some other cause for lunisolar precession than the Sun and Moon, that would contradict known gravitational physics -- a pretty high price to pay just to keep someone's pet theory alive.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Precession could also be explained if the entire solar system is following a curved path through inertial space. The Sun could be orbiting an unseen companion with a period of about 24,000 years. In other words, the Sun is in a long-period binary system.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Among the many problems with the "unseen companion" theory, this basic premise is simply untrue. Gravitational tugs from a dstant star, much like those from other planets, would change Earth's orbit around the Sun, but have essentially no effect whatever on precession. That is because precession is not caused by inverse square forces acting on its center of mass, but rather by inverse cube torques acting differently on different parts of the Earth's non-spherical shape. A very distant body, because of that distance, would apply essentially identical forces to every part of the Earth, causing no precession.

Cruttenden, however, denies that precession is a motion of Earth's spin axis, and claims the whole solar system is being slowly rotated. But this is his failure to understand what is being observed. I pointed out that an observer with a zenith tube could stand at the north pole and watch the stars slowly precess by. Meanwhile, observations of the Sun, which define the ecliptic plane, show no such motion relative to the stars. So it is certain that Earth's spin axis is moving with respect to Earth's orbital plane by the amount of lunisolar precession.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">This model has the advantage of simplicity...<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">and the disadvantage of contradicting known physics.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">... and solves a number of problems with the lunisolar theory, such as, that the seasons do not regress through the calender (when the calender is adjusted appropriately through leap years, etc.); ...<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">This is a false starement, and arises from not understanding what kind of motion precession is, as I mentioned above. Our calendar systems were deliberately set by humans to follow the length of the tropical year, not the sidereal year, so that the calendar would track the seasons. If we had not made that choice, then in 12,000 years we would have winter in July in the northern hemisphere.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">... the Earth does not seem to precess or wobble with respect to benchmarks within the solar system, such as meteor showers, transits of Venus, etc. but only with respect to the "fixed" stars.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Again, this arises from not understanding astrometry and the motions of the celestial sphere. All of them do exactly what is expected if precession is a motion of Earth's pole, and of nothing else.

Here is perhaps the most telling point of all that can be raised against Cruttenden's theory: Other planets have spin axis precession also, but at drastically different rates that depend on the amount of spin flattening and distance from the Sun of those planets. The unseen companion is supposed to produce the same change for all planets because it is rotating the whole solar system. But that is contradicted by observations.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It would also explain the Sun's "missing" angular momentum - most of it would be in the Sun's orbital motion.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That angular momentum is not "missing", but resides in the orbital motions of the planets. Fission theory accounts for this nicely.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">A number of astronomers, including Luis Alvarez, have proposed the Sun is a binary, but Walter Cruttenden is most closely associated with the binary precession theory to my knowledge.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">I did some paid work for Cruttenden, who was trying to find an open-minded astronomer to back his theory. I began with an open mind, but quickly found that:
(1) the theory was not viable for dozens of reasons
(2) Cruttenden's mind was not open to results that disfavored his pet theory
(3) Cruttenden had surrounded himself with paid lackey's who encouraged him, dealt with attacks from outsiders, invented ad hoc helper hypotheses as needed to keep the theory viable, and kept consuming his funds.

Naturally, my services were quickly terminated. [BTW, I didn't mind that because I felt my time and knowledge were being wasted anyway. But I thought it showed plainly how vested Cruttenden is in this theory. This is why wealthy individuals tend to surround themselves with people who pay lip service to what the boss wants to hear, and rarely hear from people who tell them the cold, hard facts.]

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">This leaves an object that is massive but emits very little electromagnetic radiation.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">That is rather contradictory. Massive implies hot, and hot implies radiating abundantly.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">Possible candidates could be a brown dwarf, or a collapsed object like a neutron star, a supernova remnant. I favor the latter possibility myself.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Doesn't that require that the Sun had a companion that went supernova? That would have wiped out the planets and changed the Sun drastically from a normal G-type star.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">The best way to detect it may be through occultation of background stars. This latter method may be the only way to pick up a collapsed object, or maybe gravitational lensing of background objects.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">The gravitational lensing should indeed be strong and evident. But the whole sky has been surveyed many times, which is how we get proper motions of stars. And region where gravitational lensing was going on would distort all the proper motions in that vicinity. No such region has been seen. So no dark companion with significant gravity exists.

There is now yet another direct test for this, one that I also mentioned to Cruttenden. Pulsar timings allow us to detect any unknown accelerations of the Sun's motion through space, because they would displace the Earth a bit closer to pulsars in some direction, but farther away from pulsars in the opposite direction. So the arrival times of pulsar signals would be changed by a certain predictable pattern across the sky. This has long been known as a test for the possible existence of undiscovered planets of significant mass. No such displacement signal is seen, meaning the Sun is not undergoing any significant acceleration from an unknown cause. -|Tom|-

<br />A recent breakthrough was made by V J Slabinsky (see his article in <i>Pushing Gravity</i>) by using a mixture of reflected and absorbed gravitons. There is a range of mixtures that produces strong gravitational acceleration fields with small heating effects.

LB
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Sorry. Hit the wrong button on these damned laptops.

If both bodies were a nuclear core, each of which fully reflects gravitons, then between them there would be a cylinder of space which would hve a deficit of gravitons traveling between them. Would this not create a push on the "outside" of each body, resulting in apparent attraction between the bodies?

I will read up on Slabinsky. However, my thinking is that gravitons heat up the Elysium around protons, not the protons themselves. Heating up a proton, in and of itself, may be utterly meaningless. Emission of electromagnetic waves from a nucleus could be entirely an issue of "electrons". If an electron is simply an assembly of elysons, then the proton is not active in the "heating up" or emission of electromagnetic waves. They are simply along for the ride as Elysium is heated up.


Gregg Wilson

Thanks, Tom. A couple of questions, and yes these do come from Cruttenden. Supposedly the precession rate is increasing, which would be expected if the solar system were in an elliptical orbit and was approaching perigee. Do you feel the data is not accurate, or if it is, has another cause? It can't increase forever, obviously. How is the precession of other planets measured, of Mars, say? Mars' tiny moons should have no significant gravitational effect.
If the Sun formed with, say, a blue supergiant companion, common in the spiral arms of the galaxy, this massive star would have run through its main sequence in a few million years and went supernova very early in the Sun's evolution, probably before there were any formed planets, let alone life. It could have had an effect on the subsequent evolution of the solar system, which does not seem to be typical from the study of extrasolar planets up to this point.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by nemesis</i>
<br />Supposedly the precession rate is increasing, which would be expected if the solar system were in an elliptical orbit and was approaching perigee. Do you feel the data is not accurate, or if it is, has another cause?<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote"> <ul><li>The rate of increase of precession is very small, less than 0.1% per century.</li><li>It was not discovered by observation, but rather was discovered by computation, being a requirement of simple gravitational physics.</li><li>The physical reason for the increase is the decrease in the tilt of Earth's axis relative to the ecliptic plane, something caused by planetary perturbations on Earth's orbit.</li><li>That decrease in the tilt (obliquity) is a long-term periodic effect, and will eventually slow and reverse. The rate of change of precession will do the same.</li></ul><blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">How is the precession of other planets measured, of Mars, say? Mars' tiny moons should have no significant gravitational effect.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">You can find a description of the precessions of other planets and their sources in the <i>Explanatory Supplement to the Astronomical Ephemeris</i>. I recommend the 1960 edition, in which it is easier to find things than in the more extensive 1992 edition edited by Seidelmann. The precession of Mars is -707"/century, produced primarily by the Sun acting on the extra-strong flattening of Mars. Observations were always consistent with that computed precession, but were not so sensitive as to prove it until Mars Global Surveyor arrived in 1997 and began maping the surface at high resolution. Then having the precession correct became important in predicting future ground tracks of the spacecraft.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">If the Sun formed with, say, a blue supergiant companion, common in the spiral arms of the galaxy, this massive star would have run through its main sequence in a few million years and went supernova very early in the Sun's evolution, probably before there were any formed planets, let alone life.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">A supernova that close would have wiped out the solar nebula from which the planets formed, and would have made the Sun into a "peculiar" star (in the stellar classification sense of "peculiar"). You can't have it both ways.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote">It could have had an effect on the subsequent evolution of the solar system, which does not seem to be typical from the study of extrasolar planets up to this point.<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">Fission theory indicates that the solar system is typical. But the jury is still out on nearly everything about extrasolar planets. -|Tom|-

There is an implicit contradiction here. Our planets - according to the gravitational accretion theory - are formed from the debris of a supernova. If, instead, the planetary material is formed within our Sun - by conventional nuclear fusion theory - the Sun had to reach temperatures of hundreds of billions (I repeat, billions) of degrees. No apparent evidence for that. So if a supernova is too far away, we don't get enough material to make the planets. If the supernova is too close, our primal nebula is blown away. I don't like these odds when we are seeing many extrasolar planets.

Conventional theories for the formation of planetary material fall awfully short of reality.

Gregg Wilson

The study of extrasolar planets, while there is a strong selection effect, shows a predominance of "hot Jupiters", gas giants orbiting their star in very tight orbits, often having periods of only a few days. It has been proposed that this is due to gas and dust in planetary nebulas, resulting in drag and a "death spiral" for newly formed planets. A nearby supernova could have cleared a young solar system of excess gas and dust with its radiation and blast wave, halting the "death spiral" and stabilizing the solar system. This would imply that solar systems like ours are relatively rare.
Tom, I know you favor fission for the formation of planets - so how do planets migrate so far out after fission? How does a new fission pair force already existing planets farther out?