All educated people from childhood, even from school textbooks, are familiar with a picture showing the comparative scales of the planets of the solar system:
The picture does not perfectly represent the mass ratios, since the surfaces of the Sun and Jupiter are assumed to be gaseous. However, the approximate mass ratio looks something like this.
So the Sun is about 1000 times heavier than Jupiter, and Jupiter is three times heavier than all the other planets put together, plus the Kuiper belt, asteroids, and so on. Therefore, if you make a comparative model of the solar system, then it will look like a sledgehammer, where the hammer is the sun, and everything else is a handle made of the lightest plastic or foam in general.
If this sledgehammer weighs 10 kilograms, then the handle will weigh only 10 grams. This raises the question: where is the barycenter, that is, the center of mass of the entire system?
As everyone understands well from practice, the center of weight of a sledgehammer, put on an inflated cellophane tube, will be in the sledgehammer. Well, maybe it will shift a couple of millimeters, but no more. However, as shown by astronomical observations, the center of mass of the solar system is significantly higher than the surface of the sun
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and the Sun revolves around this center:
With a sledgehammer, where the handle is made of foam, this can not happen in principle: neither Jupiter, nor all the other planets taken together can displace the barycenter of the solar system so much. The sun, in theory, is also homogeneous, there is no solid core dangling inside.
All of the above is one of the main arguments of the theory that the Sun has a twin star, which has turned into either a neutron star, 10-20 kilometers in diameter, or a black hole several meters in diameter. Then such a trajectory of the Sun is understandable.
The officials do not see this obvious argument point-blank and, if they are pressed against the wall, they begin to sing something about measurement errors. So, Elon Musk did not fly to the Sun with weights and weights, everything was measured on the Doppler effects of light changes when the Earth moved to the Sun and, as it were, from the Sun.
Since it is difficult to precisely intend there, an error could well have crept into the calculations, so the topic was postponed. However, circumstances developed there that the solar gravity began to interfere slightly with the team of American astronomers.
It got in the way when astronomers observed distant pulsars and could not understand the error that should be laid on the interaction of light from pulsars with gravitational waves emanating from the barycenter of the solar system. This forced them to create special software called BayesEphem and run data from a space-based gravity meter called NANOGrav through it.
As a result, it turned out that the barycenter of the solar system really lies above the surface of the sun, and not only lies, but also shifts, which cannot be explained by the existing planetary configuration. The study was published in The Astrophysical Journal and retold by Science Alert.
Rejoiced at the epoch-making miracle discovery, astronomers jumped up like children who had received gifts and ran to watch the pulsars for which everything was started. Nevertheless, the question remains open: why is the barycenter of the solar system so far from the center of the star and why is it suddenly moving?
There is also a question hanging in the air about what kind of object people see near the Sun:
We don't even know what is hanging in the sky, but we believe that it is this thing that moves the barycenter of the system. Soon it will begin to move the lithosphere as well, so we are following the development of events.
