Requiem for Relativity

This was discussed rather extensively last summer under "Origin of the Solar System" in the thread "Is the Sun a Binary"? It may be worthwhile to go back and read that.

I've put the new job up on the Bradford, depends on the weather but it should be up by Friday.

Hi Nemesis, I've readdthe thread and most of what that web site says. I think they've got the cart before the horse on this. Their precession notion, which is wrong, drives the maths for the size of the missing binary partner. Now, adding a brown dwarf to the solar system is going to shift the centre of gravity of the system but with Joe's dwarf it's not going to be by very much. The sun does wobble a bit round this point, and as we are changing that wobble, that will have an effect upon the Earth's precession. It's a radius cubed effect, so it will not be any great alteration.

It looks like the money is up only for someone who discovers their solar partner, and not for anyone who finds a brown dwarf, that doesn't cause this curved motion of the sun. Bummer!

Barbarossa can't be the same as as the hypothesized Nemesis in any case, which has been proposed to have a period of up to millions of years.

I've spent much of my time this week accurately confirming that J. Genebriera did indeed image Frey on March 25, 2007 (00:42 UT) and that S. Riley did indeed image Barbarossa on April 1, 2007 (07:39 UT). The J2000 coordinates of Genebriera's object are

11 26 22.2 -9 4 59

and of Riley's

11 26 28.0 -8 58 14.5.

The center of gravity slowed only 0.48% between the second and third segments, i.e., [Objects C3 & C 1987, Objects D & D2 1997] and [Objects D & D2 1997, Riley & Genbriera Objects 2007]. This corresponds to about 2s RA. The direction changed only 0.0048 radian (i.e., 0.48%) between the two segments. These deviations are smaller than likely would arise from observation bias: I searched entire 15x15' square images for "disappearing dots" and parts of adjoining squares also, rarely finding more than one or two starlike "disappearing dots" per square.

The direction changed 1.06% between the first and second segments, i.e., [Objects A2 & A 1954, Objects C3 & C 1987] and [Objects C3 & C 1987, Objects D & D2 1997]. The center of gravity slowed 3.6%.

The correction for Earth parallax was made by interpolating the sun's position according to old volumes of the American Ephemeris & Astronomical Almanac in the Iowa State Univ. library. For 1954 I had to use the formula therein to convert to J2000 coordinates. On an IBM486 computer I wrote a "BASIC" program to find the rectangular coordinates of every object precisely. I adjusted the objects' distance from the sun (presumed the same for all) so that the angle subtended between 1954 and 2007 equalled that for a body with a slightly elliptical orbit of period 2688 yr (my best estimate of the period of progression of the 5:2 Jupiter:Saturn resonance) when at said distance from the sun, which was 198.5 AU (corresponding to 2834 yr for circular orbit).

Then I adjusted the mass ratio of Barbarossa (i.e., A2, C3, D & Riley) and Frey (i.e., A, C, D2 & Genebriera) to 0.63:0.37, at which the torsion of the great circle was about constant: that is, the (small) break between the first (32.9 yr) and second (10.1 yr) segments was about twice the break between the second (10.1 yr) and last (10.1 yr) segments.

Corrections for proper motion of reference stars, between the 1987 date of the SERC-Red reference plate, and 2007 or 1954, all were negligible (1997 had its own Aladin reference plate). The aberration of light from the objects is negligible because it affects the reference stars as well; the aberration of sunlight is negligible because the sun's position is needed only for the small Earth parallax correction. The correction for the different distances of Barbarossa vs. Frey from the sun, is negligible.

The decreasing angular speed could be due to the influence of a small distant moon. The moon(s) seem to orbit Barbarossa in a plane near that of Barbarossa's orbit, so any torsion of the great circle would be relatively small.

The strange shapes of both Genebriera's and Riley's objects might be due to rings like Saturn's. The Roche limits for these bodies, a likely distance for rings, would be 1-2" depending on densities. The bodies' diameters should be about 0.8". A barely detectable planetary disk could make a spot smaller than that of a star of equal bolometric magnitude.

Hi Joe, in the image thread I put up, simply to allow bigger images, I asked what you thought of that odd little smudge. A galaxy maybe? It struck me that on a pc monitor it might not even show up so here's a blow up of the region and a further blow up of the smudge, inside the blue oblong.

As I was waiting for the next Bradford image i thought I'd see if coud find anything odd,and this was the only thing.

<blockquote id="quote"><font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id="quote">quote:<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"><i>Originally posted by Stoat</i>
<br />Hi Joe, in the image thread I put up, simply to allow bigger images, I asked what you thought of that odd little smudge. A galaxy maybe? It struck me that on a pc monitor it might not even show up so here's a blow up of the region and a further blow up of the smudge, inside the blue oblong.

As I was waiting for the next Bradford image i thought I'd see if coud find anything odd,and this was the only thing.


<hr height="1" noshade id="quote"></blockquote id="quote"></font id="quote">

Thanks for the blowup of the smudge. Maybe it's a star surrounded by nebulosity. The core is too bright, relative to the periphery, for an ordinary galaxy.

I'm glad you're looking at these photos intensively. The best bet is to look near the locations at which something showed up on Genebriera's & Riley's photos. A rough but adequate correction for date, through mid-May, is -0.8s RA, +5" Decl, for each day after March 29.