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So you're into sci fi? But what about sci fact? Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction...

Each month our very own Voyager Science Queen* will bring you interesting, quirky and downright bizarre tasty morsels from the world of science. And its all completely, totally, 100% true!

Science Page April 2010

Our Invisible Sun

Sometimes, as we know from the Science Page, life seems to imitate art. Just recently, there have been two topics that are all over the astronomy news, and has even managed to drift out into the mainstream news. So, instead of enjoying an April Fool's Day joke, how about I offer you all the whole concept that the universe has a sense of humour?

Twin suns are not uncommon in our galaxy. Think of that moment in first Star Wars movie (fourth chronologically), when young Luke watched a Tatooine sunset with two stars. It looked pretty good, didn't it.

Well, we possibly have the real world version right here in our solar system! (Did I just here a chorus of people muttering 'cool'.)

It seems like our 'twin' sun is an idea whose time had come, as NASA, astronomers and palaeontologists have all started to consider the concept. What they all theorise is that we have a tiny red or brown dwarf star just five to fifteen times the size of Jupiter, lurking out past the Oort Cloud, and its gravitational pull is what sends comets spiralling off towards the Sun. They have nicknamed this (so far only theoretical) star 'Nemesis'. It was Berkeley's Richard Muller who originally proposed the presence of Nemesis.

Palaeontologists David Raup and Jack Sepkoski propose Nemesis as the regulator of a 26 million year cycle of mass extinction. It would be the gravitation interaction of the Sun and Nemesis that generates the strange orbits of comets and asteroids. It has been theorised that it was an asteroid impact that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs, and that other mass extinctions have occurred in the past.

One of Sedna's discoverers (See the Science Page about Sedna, our tenth 'planet', now considered a planetoid), Mike Brown, has made comments along the lines that, logically, Sedna's location and orbit mystifies him. However, the presence of Nemesis would clear up this astronomical paradox, by adding another source of gravitation to the mix.

American Emeritus Professor of Physics, John Matese, entertains other suspicions as to why Nemesis might exist. The comets appear to originate from the same region of the Oort Cloud, which points to something interfering with that region's gravity pattern. A dwarf star would fit the bill nicely.

As I've mentioned in previous articles, the universe has more 'dark matter' than astronomers first suspected. Dark matter is stuff that doesn't glow or shine, so that is can only be detected by its gravitational effects, or by obscuring light sources. However, NASA has a new toy, the Wide -field Infrared Survey Explorer telescope (WISE - do they now name these things so they have a good acronym?). WISE should be better designed to locate 'dark' objects such as Nemesis.

So there you have it. I don't know when science fiction authors started writing about twin suns and hidden planets, but the concepts have been around since the 1930s at least. See, there is nothing new under the sun!

*The Voyager Science Queen is also known as Lynne Lumsden Green

So, who is this woman who attempts to entertain us with Science?

Lynne Lumsden Green lives on the Sunshine Coast of Queensland, and attends the University of the Sunshine Coast. Ever the perpetual student, she is adding a B.A. in Creative Writing to her B.SC. in Zoology (Jennifer Fallon is her role model). As one of the founding members of Scriber Space, the site for USC creative writers, she hopes to create a writing community as lively and as close as the Voyager writing community. She spends her non-study hours volunteering for writing-related events, writing, reading, and – oh yes – looking after her family. She is still passionately interested in anything and everything, and enjoys the opportunity to share this passion via the Science Page. Terry Pratchett, Isaac Asimov, Neil Gaiman, and all the Voyager authors are her favourite people on the planet...and one of her goals is to meet all of those authors, well, at least those authors still in the land of the living. Recently, her own writing efforts have been meeting with better success. She is putting this down to her excellent lecturers and persistence, and to the fact that you can eat chocolate while typing.

Read previous Sci-Facts

Looking for more scientific oddities? Have you checked out Dr Steven Juan's website? He is, quite literally, the wizard of odds!