Do you know what Nemesis means?

If you follow Brick Top’s definition it’s “a righteous infliction of retribution manifested by an appropriate agent.” For some scientists it is “The Death Star.” A proposed undetectable object on the edge of our solar system that hurls comets at Earth every 26 million years. This cycle syncs with the mass extinctions currently documented by scientists.

If true, this Nemesis would qualify as a “horrible ‘see you next Tuesday'”.

This theory is not the only theory going around, of course. NASA’s newest telescope WISE(Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer ) looks to answer the nemesis question once and for all.

Richard Muller of the University of California Berkeley first suggested the Nemesis theory, and even wrote a popular science book on the topic. He thinks Nemesis is a red dwarf star 1.5 light years away. Many scientists counter that such a wide orbit is inherently unstable and could not have lasted long – certainly not long enough to have caused the extinctions seen in Earth’s fossil record. But Muller says this instability has resulted in an orbit that has changed greatly over billions of years, and in the next billion years Nemesis will be thrown free of the solar system.

Binary star systems are common in the galaxy. It is estimated that one-third of the stars in the Milky Way are either binary or part of a multiple-star system.

When will we know the answer?

We may not have an answer to the Nemesis question until mid-2013. WISE needs to scan the sky twice in order to generate the time-lapsed images astronomers use to detect objects in the outer solar system. The change in location of an object between the time of the first scan and the second tells astronomers about the object’s location and orbit. Then comes the long task of analyzing the data.

“I don’t suspect we’ll have completed the search for candidate objects until mid-2012, and then we may need up to a year of time to complete telescopic follow-up of those objects,” said Kirkpatrick.

Two to three years? Putting the year 2012 aside. We’re guessing that’s enough time between the millions of years cycle.

via astrobiology magazine