Requiem for Relativity

Hi Joe, a couple of questions. On the Tifft period, are you saying that this 2.1 km/sec is a statistical effect due to our solar system revolving round the new centre of gavity, due to the brown dwarf being there?

If the cloud that created our sun and its companion dwarf split very early, rather than fissioned off from the collapsing protostar later , then it will have taken a higher percentage of the heavier elements with it. If it happened that way here, it would suggest that other brown dwarf companions, round stars, are similar. Jupiter mass but smaller radius. That would knock down the albedo but so could the core's convection of heavier elements through the dwalf's atmosphere. The surface layers being more dense, drops the albedo further. Is this roughly what you're saying?

The Vulcan thing. "Maybe both Vulcan and Barbarossa are manifestations of the same real phenomenon which is not a planet." This has me totally stumped. What do you think it might be then? I tend to think that the whole vulcan affair was part of the new planet mania sweeping the world at the time, and not real.

<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, a couple of questions. On the Tifft period, are you saying that this 2.1 km/sec is a statistical effect due to our solar system revolving round the new centre of gravity, due to the brown dwarf being there?

If the cloud that created our sun and its companion dwarf split very early, rather than fissioned off from the collapsing protostar later , then it will have taken a higher percentage of the heavier elements with it. If it happened that way here, it would suggest that other brown dwarf companions, round stars, are similar. Jupiter mass but smaller radius. That would knock down the albedo but so could the core's convection of heavier elements through the dwarf's atmosphere. The surface layers being more dense, drops the albedo further. Is this roughly what you're saying?

The Vulcan thing. "Maybe both Vulcan and Barbarossa are manifestations of the same real phenomenon which is not a planet." This has me totally stumped. What do you think it might be then? I tend to think that the whole vulcan affair was part of the new planet mania sweeping the world at the time, and not real.
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Hi Stoat!

I think the Tifft periods are a fundamental property of space or matter, which tends to favor certain redshifts and energies within our solar system and everywhere else.

"...[the brown dwarf companion] will have taken a higher percentage of the heavier elements with it. If it happened that way here, it would suggest that other brown dwarf companions, round stars, are similar. Jupiter mass but smaller radius. That would knock down the albedo but so could the core's convection of heavier elements through the dwarf's atmosphere. The surface layers being more dense, drops the albedo further." - Robert Turner

It's been calculated in journal articles, that moderately warm, borderline brown dwarfs have heavier elements like sodium in their atmospheres, which reduce the albedo to 1%. Again, this is very theoretical. No one really knows what Wien's-law surface temperature is needed for this. All we know is that it might happen.

My reading yesterday increased my respect for the skill of Lescarbault & LeVerrier. I think Lescarbault and some of the others saw something real but it wasn't a sunspot or a rock. The duration of the phenomenon was consistent with the duration of a pseudo-transit of the "agravitational region". Luna should have a small "agrav region" of its own which usually transits Luna at full moon; this might explain some of the lights seen on Luna. Jupiter should have a big agrav region which often eclipses Jupiter when Jupiter's opposition occurs not too far from the ecliptic.

- Joe Keller

Regarding the likelihood of a brown dwarf companion, the most informative journal article I found today, is Gizis et al, Astrophysical Journal 551(2):L163+, 2000:

"Our evidence [is] that [4 to 32% of][spectral type] F [to] M0 dwarfs [e.g., the sun is a type G dwarf, i.e., not giant - JK] have...[brown dwarf] companions at [separations &gt;1000 AU, i.e., considered "widely separated"]...

"The fraction [of sun-like stars having brown dwarf companions] in the range 100-1000 AU cannot yet be constrained, but...*may* be as common as wide companions..."


Gizis et al sliced and diced the data various ways and came up with similar numbers. Other articles made weaker but not contradictory statements. Another encouraging article, with Gizis' colleague JD Kirkpatrick as primary author (Astronomical Journal 121(6):3235+, 2001) reports the discovery of two type G stars, each with a widely separated brown dwarf companion.

From the foregoing, I can say that the sun had a big chance of having a brown dwarf companion beyond 100 AU (other articles report that sun-like stars seldom have brown dwarf companions inside 40 AU). Old systems like ours tend to have old, cold brown dwarfs. My post above, discussing magnitudes, shows that an old, cold brown dwarf at Barbarossa's distance, could be as bright as +13.5, but with typical trans-Neptunian albedo and Jupiter size would be +16. Theories of diameter and albedo indicate that it might be as dim as +20. So, the failure of other astronomers to detect the sun's brown dwarf companion, Barbarossa, does not much decrease the likelihood of Barbarossa's existence. Furthermore the likelihood that astronomers would have detected a cold brown dwarf beyond 1000 AU (which could only be as bright as +20.5) is almost zero.

Often brown dwarfs have brown dwarf companions. These usually have small orbits. So, for Barbarossa to have a Jupiter-like planet (or micro-dwarf) Frey, orbiting at about 1 AU, is not surprising.

The sun rotates somewhat slower than average for a star of its type. Therefore it is more, not less, likely to have a companion which removed angular momentum from its formative cloud. Mere planets are commonplace. Furthermore, recent theoretical articles conclude that planets alone are not enough. A companion forming in a relatively circular orbit might have been more effective at removing angular momentum. If the sun's Oort cloud is unusually dense, then Barbarossa's orbit might have been circularized by interaction with the Oort cloud. An especially old brown dwarf might be likelier to have its orbit circularized (by means other than the tidal mechanism which applies only to much nearer orbits).

It's been theorized that without Jupiter, cometary bombardment of Earth would preclude advanced life. Barbarossa might be a similar prerequisite to intelligent life, arresting derelicts from the Oort cloud while Jupiter arrests derelicts from the Kuiper belt. Also, an orbit inclined much less than 39 degrees to the planets' orbits (Barbarossa's seems to be 14), is prerequisite to intelligent life (otherwise the outer planets, at least, intermittently would become eccentric - see above).

Hi Joe, I just downloaded a pdf file of a paper by Tifft and gave it quick skim read. That's pretty amazing stuff[] When he got to the bit about our being flat liners on a one dimensional line, I thought of the song, "I'll take the high road and you take the low road, and I'll be in Scotland afor ye." ( the song's about death but that's by the by)

Now, I've never liked the idea of time as simply another spatial dimension but have no great problems with thinking of time as having a metric of its own. Suppose that we are forced, as matter, to walk the "high road" along the hillls and dales of a sine wave. Light has to do the same but its sine wave is of a much lower amplitude. Lazy fat gravity, just walks along the x axis. We all arrive at the same time, to find that we, matter, have walked a thousand miles, light has walked five miles and gravity has walked five yards [8D] Being one dimensional time people, we would be gob smacked by this, as we couldn't see the curves we walked but only a straight line.

<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, I just downloaded a pdf file of a paper by Tifft and gave it quick skim read. That's pretty amazing stuff[] When he got to the bit about our being flat liners on a one dimensional line, I thought of the song, "I'll take the high road and you take the low road, and I'll be in Scotland afor ye." ( the song's about death but that's by the by)

Now, I've never liked the idea of time as simply another spatial dimension but have no great problems with thinking of time as having a metric of its own. Suppose that we are forced, as matter, to walk the "high road" along the hillls and dales of a sine wave. Light has to do the same but its sine wave is of a much lower amplitude. Lazy fat gravity, just walks along the x axis. We all arrive at the same time, to find that we, matter, have walked a thousand miles, light has walked five miles and gravity has walked five yards [8D] Being one dimensional time people, we would be gob smacked by this, as we couldn't see the curves we walked but only a straight line.
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Surely there are many unimagined possibilities. Thanks for your comment!

Twelve light-years away, is a star system like the Sun, Barbarossa & Frey:

"Epsilon Indi Ba,Bb: The nearest binary brown dwarf", McCaughrean et al, Astronomy & Astrophysics 413:1029-1036, 2004.

The primary, Eps Indi A, is a main-sequence Type K star thought to be roughly 1.3 Gyr old. At a distance of 1500 AU, it is orbited by a pair of brown dwarfs (Ba & Bb) which orbit each other about 2.65 AU apart. There is extreme observational bias in favor of hotter brown dwarfs that are self-illuminated in infrared, and in favor of resolvable brown dwarfs farther than 1000 AU from their primaries. So, presumably this pair of brown dwarfs is unusually massive and hot, and unusually distant from the primary.

The dimmer one, Eps Indi Bb, is estimated to have 0.027 solar mass and surface temperature 854K. I estimate Barbarossa to have 1/3 this mass and, like the Sun, 3.5x this age. So, it's plausible that Barbarossa would be too cold to be self-illuminated in infrared.

From luminosity and temperature, the diameter of the brighter one, Eps Indi Ba (which has est. 0.045 solar mass) is estimated as 53,000 mi.; this is only 72% of "the minimum...predicted by structural models..." (Op. cit., p. 1034). So, Barbarossa likewise might be much smaller than the Jupiter size predicted by structural models that assume a Jupiter-like composition.