NASA experts have suggested that the Sun may have a sister star invisible to astronomers, which makes up a binary star system with it.
According to scientists, this star - a brown dwarf, is related to periodic mass extinctions on Earth. Therefore, it received the unofficial name "death star" or Nemesis after the Greek goddess of vengeance. Therefore, experts argue, it would be nice to detect it in advance so that it does not attack us unexpectedly.
The hypothesis of the existence of a hypothetical star was put forward back in 1984 by paleontologists from Chicago David Raup and Jack Sepkoski. They argued, after studying the fossil remains of marine organisms for a quarter of a billion years, that mass extinctions of terrestrial organisms occurred every 26 million years. It is with such a periodicity that Nemesis approaches its "sister" - our Sun.
And when approaching, the "death star" enters the Oort cloud - a giant sphere of trillions of ice blocks around the solar system. Due to the gravitational disturbance, the mass of the boulders is knocked out of the cloud and falls in the form of comets on the Earth and other planets. Strong periodic "bombing" of the Earth and cause the death of organisms. The recently discovered elliptical dwarf planet Sedna seems to confirm the presence of a large undiscovered body affecting its inexplicable orbit. Maybe she's influenced by Nemesis?
The final finishing touch to this story can be delivered by the WISE telescope, which has the necessary equipment to detect dark objects in the infrared spectrum. And to skeptics who doubt the existence of the "death star", enthusiasts cite the example of the French mathematician Urban Le Verrier, who first calculated the existence of Neptune, and only after that it was discovered. Signs of the existence of Nemesis abound, now it remains to capture the star visually.
