Massive dark object 'lurking on edge of solar system hurling comets at Earth'

By Daily Mail Reporter
Last updated at 8:50 AM on 8th December 2010

A massive dark object may be lurking on the edge of our solar system, according to scientists.

Most comets that fly into the inner solar system seem to come from the outer region of the Oort cloud - a region of icy dust and debris left over from the birth of the solar system.

The cloud starts from a point about 93 billion miles from the Sun and stretches for around three light years and contains billions of comets, most of them small and hidden.
A Nasa graphic which illustrates how the Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system.

A Nasa graphic which illustrates how the Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system. Scientists believe that an object with a huge mass may be pushing comets towards Earth from the cloud

Now new calculations suggest a large object that is up to four times as big as Jupiter could be responsible for sending them in our direction.

The scientists have analysed the comets in the Oort cloud and deduced that 25 per-cent of them would need a nudge by a body of at least Jupiter size before they changed orbit.

a different part of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.
A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards our solar system

A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards Earth


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Astrophysicists John Matese and Daniel Whitmire at the University of Louisiana came up with theory said that 'something smaller than a Jovian mass would not be strong enough to perform the task'.

They believe that our solar system has a hidden 'companion' that has so far remained undetected.

The scientists have been studying the cloud using WISE, Nasa's infra-red space telescope that is capable of detecting dark objects.

Matese said: 'I think this whole issue will be resolved in the next five to 10 years, because there’s surveys coming on line that will dwarf the comet sample we have today.

'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,' Matese added. 'We anticipate that WISE is going to falsify or verify our conjecture.'

About 3,200 long-period comets are known, one of the most famous being Hale-Bopp which was visible to even the naked eye during 1996 and 1997.

Halley's Comet, which reappears about every 75 years, is a 'short-period' comet from a different part of the Solar System called the Kuiper Belt.
A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards our solar system

A large planet that is in orbit outside the solar system may be pushing comets towards Earth

If it exists the new planet is so freezing cold it is difficult to spot, researchers said.

It could be found up to 30,000 astronomical units from the sun. One AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun, about 93 million miles.

Scientists have already proposed that a hidden star, which they call 'Nemesis,' might exist a light-year or so away from our sun.

They suggest that during its orbit it would regularly enter the Oort cloud, jostling the orbits of many comets there and causing some to fall toward Earth.

These occasional comet showers could be why the mass extinctions on Earth are so regular, some scientists believe.

The research appeared in the online edition of the journal Icarus.

'Most planetary scientists would not be surprised if the largest undiscovered companion was Neptune-sized or smaller, but a Jupiter-mass object would be a surprise,' Matese told SPACE.com

solar system/oort cloud
© Donald K. Yeoman/NASA, JPL
A Nasa graphic which illustrates how the Oort Cloud surrounds our solar system. Scientists believe that an object with a huge mass may be pushing comets towards Earth from the cloud

'If the conjecture is indeed true, the important implications would relate to how it got there — touching on the early solar environment — and how it might have affected the subsequent distributions of comets and, to a lesser extent, the known planets.'


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Electromagnetics

NIST Solving a Mystery Among Electrons

When it comes to sleuthing in science, few are better than the intrepid investigators at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). For example, take the “Case of the Stray Electrons.”

NIST researchers have created nanoscale devices that manipulate electrons in order to count them one at a time. Such counting is critical to the development of new fundamental electrical standards. When two electrons are bound in pairs (called Cooper pairs) in a superconductor, they can be manipulated much faster, providing larger currents that can be measured more accurately. Manipulation of Cooper pairs also is important in several schemes to develop quantum computers. Past attempts at manipulation, however, have been thwarted by the existence of a small number of unpaired electrons rambling around in the superconducting state. Avoiding these unpaired electrons is the mystery that NIST is now helping solve.

NIST researchers have uncovered an important clue by showing that a previously unappreciated factor has a strong effect on the number of unpaired electrons in Cooper pair devices. Electron counting devices are made from two layers of aluminum, where the strengths of the bonds pairing electrons in each layer can be different. This slight difference originally was thought to be unimportant. However, a study of more than a dozen devices in which this difference was varied in a controlled way and indepen-dently measured in each device, shows the
difference does affect device performance directly.

Space Exploration

NIST Micro-Positioner May Help Send Messages from the Stars

Phoning home from 93 billion miles away—only E.T. and other science fiction characters can do that. But with the help of National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) know-how, reality soon may catch up with imagination.

Conceptual designs for a “realistic interstellar explorer,” or RISE—a highly autonomous craft that would travel far beyond this solar system to collect scien-tific data—call for a laser-based communications link to Earth that relies in part on a recent NIST invention called a Parallel Cantilever Bi-axial Micro-Positioner. The prototype NIST device acts as a mechanical filter that generates very straight lines by screening out all other motions. Primarily intended for use in the delicate assembly and alignment of optoelectronic devices and applications in micro- and nano-manufacturing, the micro-positioner in a different application offers a promising means for meeting the demanding range, mass and power requirements for the RISE.

In its interstellar role, the micro-positioner would be used to position a lens that steers a laser beam communication link toward Earth. The beam must be pointed precisely because the distances would be, well, astronomical. The RISE is envisioned as having a range up to 1,000 Astronomical Units (AU)—1,000 times the distance from the Earth to the sun, or 93 billion miles.

A recent paper by researchers at NIST and Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (which is designing the RISE) concluded that an optical communications downlink spanning 1,000 AU is technically feasible in the next decade if these new technologies can be sufficiently refined. For example, the current range of the NIST micro-positioner would have to be improved by a factor of nearly 10.