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Title:
Is the solar system entering a nearby interstellar cloud
Authors:
Vidal-Madjar, A.; Laurent, C.; Bruston, P.; Audouze, J.
Affiliation:
AA(CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique Stellaire et Planetaire, Verrieres-le-Buisson, Essonne, France), AB(CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique Stellaire et Planetaire, Verrieres-le-Buisson, Essonne, France), AC(CNRS, Laboratoire de Physique Stellaire et Planetaire, Verrieres-le-Buisson, Essonne, France), AD(Meudon Observatoire, Hauts-de-Seine; Paris XI, Universite, Orsay, Essonne, France)
Publication:
Astrophysical Journal, Part 1, vol. 223, July 15, 1978, p. 589-600. (ApJ Homepage)
Publication Date:
07/1978
Category:
Astrophysics
Origin:
STI
NASA/STI Keywords:
....................
Abstract
....................
Observational arguments in favor of such a cloud are presented, and implications of the presence of a nearby cloud are discussed, including possible changes in terrestrial climate. It is suggested that the postulated interstellar cloud should encounter the solar system at some unspecified time in the near future and might have a drastic influence on terrestrial climate in the next 10,000 years.
NASA Study Suggests Giant Space Clouds Iced Earth Eons ago, giant clouds in space may have led to global extinctions, according to two recent technical papers supported by NASA’s Astrobiology Institute.
One paper outlines a rare scenario in which Earth iced over during snowball glaciations, after the solar system passed through dense space clouds. In a more likely scenario, less dense giant molecular clouds may have enabled charged particles to enter Earths atmosphere, leading to destruction of much of the planets protective ozone layer. This resulted in global extinctions, according to the second paper. Both recently appeared in the Geophysical Research Letters.
“Computer models show dramatic climate change can be caused by interstellar dust accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere during the solar system’s immersion into a dense space cloud,” said Alex Pavlov, principal author of the two papers. He is a scientist at the University of Colorado, Boulder. The resulting dust layer hovering over the Earth would absorb and scatter solar radiation, yet allow heat to escape from the planet into space, causing runaway ice buildup and snowball glaciations.
ESA sees stardust storms heading for Solar System
PRESS RELEASE
Date Released: Monday, August 18, 2003
Source: Artemis Society
Until ten years ago, most astronomers did not believe stardust could enter our Solar System. Then ESA's Ulysses spaceprobe discovered minute stardust particles leaking through the Sun's magnetic shield, into the realm of Earth and the other planets. Now, the same spaceprobe has shown that a flood of dusty particles is heading our way.
...........
What is surprising in this new Ulysses discovery is that the amount of stardust has continued to increase even after the solar activity calmed down and the magnetic field resumed its ordered shape in 2001.
Scientists believe that this is due to the way in which the polarity changed during solar maximum. Instead of reversing completely, flipping north to south, the Sun's magnetic poles have only rotated at halfway and are now more or less lying sideways along the Sun's equator. This weaker configuration of the magnetic shield is letting in two to three times more stardust than at the end of the 1990s. Moreover, this influx could increase by as much as ten times until the end of the current solar cycle in 2012.
Like a wounded Starship Enterprise, our solar system's natural shields are faltering, letting in a flood of cosmic rays. The sun's recent listlessness is resulting in record-high radiation levels that pose a hazard to both human and robotic space missions.
Galactic cosmic rays are speeding charged particles that include protons and heavier atomic nuclei. They come from outside the solar system, though their exact sources are still being debated.
Magnetic Field Weakening in Stages, Old Ships' Logs Suggest
John Roach
for National Geographic News
May 11, 2006
Earth's magnetic field is weakening in staggered steps, a new analysis of centuries-old ships logs suggests.
The finding could help scientists better understand the way Earth's magnetic poles reverse.
The planet's magnetic field flips—north becomes south and vice versa—on average every 300,000 years. However, the actual time between reversals varies widely.
The field last flipped about 800,000 years ago, according to the geologic record.
Since 1840, when accurate measures of the intensity were first made, the field strength has declined by about 5 percent per century.
Secular increase of the astronomical unit and perihelion precessions as tests of the Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati multi-dimensional braneworld scenario
Lorenzo Iorio JCAP09(2005)006 doi: 10.1088/1475-7516/2005/09/006
Lorenzo Iorio
Viale Unità di Italia 68, 70125, Bari, Italy
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract. An unexpected secular increase of the astronomical unit, the length scale of the Solar System, has recently been reported by three different research groups (Krasinsky and Brumberg, Pitjeva, Standish). The latest JPL measurements amount to 7 ± 2 m cy−1. At present, there are no explanations able to accommodate such an observed phenomenon, either in the realm of classical physics or in the usual four-dimensional framework of the Einsteinian general relativity. The Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati braneworld scenario, which is a multi-dimensional model of gravity aimed at providing an explanation of the observed cosmic acceleration without dark energy, predicts, among other things, a perihelion secular shift, due to Lue and Starkman, of 5 × 10−4 arcsec cy−1 for all the planets of the Solar System. It yields a variation of about 6 m cy−1 for the Earth–Sun distance which is compatible with the observed rate of change for the astronomical unit. The recently measured corrections to the secular motions of the perihelia of the inner planets of the Solar System are in agreement with the predicted value of the Lue–Starkman effect for Mercury, Mars and, at a slightly worse level, the Earth.
Title:
Anomalies in the Solar System
Authors:
Dittus, Hansjoerg
Affiliation:
AA(ZARM, University of Bremen)
Publication:
37th COSPAR Scientific Assembly. Held 13-20 July 2008, in Montréal, Canada., p.717
Publication Date:
00/2008
Origin:
ADS
Comment:
Symposium D, session 11 (oral). Paper number: D11-0001-08
Bibliographic Code:
2008cosp...37..717D
Abstract
Several observations show unexplained phenomena in our solar system. These observations are e.g. the Pioneer Anomaly, an unexplained constant acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the Flyby Anomaly, an unexplained increase of the velocity of a series of spacecraft after Earth gravity assists, the recently reported increase of the Astronomical Unit defined by the distance of the planets from the Sun by approximately 10 m per century, the quadrupole and octupole anomaly which describes the correlation of the low l contributions of the Cosmic Microwave Background to the orientation of the Solar system. Lacking any explanation until now, these phenomena are still investigated intensively. In my talk I will discuss the present status of those investigations and the attempts to find reasonable explantions.
6 The increase of the Astronomical Unit
6.1 The observation
From the analysis of radiometric measurements of distances between the Earth and the major planets including observations from Martian orbiters and landers from 1961 to 2003 a secular increase of the Astronomical Unit of approximately 10 m/cy has been reported (36) (see also the article (37) and the discussion therein).
6.2 Search for explanation
Time–dependent gravitational constant and velocity of light This increase cannot be explained by a time–dependent gravitational constant G because the ˙ G/G needed is larger than the restrictions obtained from LLR.
It has also been speculated that a time–dependent change in the velocity of light can be responsible for this effect. Indeed, if the speed of light becomes smaller, than ranging will simulate a drift of distances. However, a inspection of Kepler’s third law
T2 4π2
a3 = GM⊙
(17)
12
shows that, if one replaces the distance a by a ranging time a = ct, then effectively the quotient G/c3 appears. Only this combination of the gravitational constant and the speed of light governs the ratio between the orbit time, in our case the orbit time of the Earth. Consequently, a time–dependent speed of light is equivalent to a time–dependent gravitational constant. Since the latter has been ruled out to be possibly responsible for an increase of the Astronomical Unit, also a time–dependent speed of light has to be ruled out.
Cosmic expansion The influence of cosmic expansion by many orders of magnitude too small, see Sec.9.2. Neither the modification of the gravitational field of the Sun nor the drag of the planetary orbits due to the expansion is big enough to explain this drift.
Clock drift An increase of ranged distances might also be due to a drift of the time scale of the form t → t + αt2 for α > 0. This is of the same form as the time drift needed to account for the Pioneer anomaly. From Kepler’s third law one may ask which α is suitable in order to simulate the increase of the Astronomical Unit. One obtains α ≈ 3 · 10−20 s−1 what is astonishing close to the clock drift needed for a clock drift simulation of the pioneer anomaly, see Eq.(16) and below.
7 The quadrupole and octupule anomaly Recently an anomalous behavior of the low–l contributions to the cosmic microwave background has been reported. It has been shown that (i) there exists an alignment between the quadrupole and octupole with > 99.87% C.L. [38], and (ii) that the quadrupole and octupole are aligned to Solar system ecliptic to > 99% C.L. [39]. No correlation with the galactic plane has been found.
The reason for this is totally unclear. One may speculate that an unknown gravitational field within the Solar system slightly redirects the incoming cosmic microwave radiation (in the similar way as a motion with a certain velocity with respect to the rest frame of the cosmological background redirects the cosmic background radiation and leads to modifications of the dipole and quadrupole parts). Such a redirection should be more pronounced for low–l components of the radiation. It should be possible to calculate the gravitational field needed for such a redirection and then to compare that with the observational data of the Solar system and the other observed anomalies.
..........................
8.2 Other anomalies?
There is one further observation which status is rather unclear bit which perhaps may fit into the other observations. This is the observation of the return time of comets: Comets usually come back a few days before they are expected when applying ordinary equations of motion. The delay usually is assigned to the outgassing of these objects. In fact, the delay is used for an estimate of the strength of this outgassing. On the other hand, it has been calculated in (44) that the assumption that starting with 20 AU there is an additional acceleration of the order of the Pioneer anomaly also leads to the effect that comets come back a few days earlier. It is not clear whether this is a serious indications but a further study of the trajectories of comets certainly is worthwhile.
THE RECENTLY DETERMINED ANOMALOUS PERIHELION PRECESSION OF SATURN
Lorenzo Iorio 2009 The Astronomical Journal 137 3615-3618 doi: 10.1088/0004-6256/137/3/3615
Lorenzo Iorio1
INFN-Sezione di Pisa, Pisa, Italy
1 Permanent address for correspondence: Viale Unità di Italia 68, 70125, Bari (BA), Italy.
E-mail: [email protected]
ABSTRACT. The astronomer E. V. Pitjeva, by analyzing with the EPM2008 ephemerides a large number of planetary observations including also two years (2004-2006) of normal points from the Cassini spacecraft, phenomenologically estimated a statistically significant nonzero correction to the usual Newtonian/Einsteinian secular precession of the longitude of the perihelion of Saturn, i.e., ; the formal, statistical error is 00007. It can be explained neither by any of the standard classical and general relativistic dynamical effects mismodeled/unmodeled in the force models of the EPM2008 ephemerides nor by several exotic modifications of gravity recently put forth to accommodate certain cosmological/astrophysical observations without resorting to dark energy/dark matter. Both independent analyses by other teams of astronomers and further processing of larger data sets from Cassini will be helpful in clarifying the nature and the true existence of the anomalous precession of the perihelion of Saturn.
Key words: celestial mechanics; ephemerides; gravitation; planets and satellites: individual (Saturn); relativity
Print publication: Issue 3 (2009 March)
Received 2008 November 4, accepted for publication 2008 December 24
Published 2009 February 23
THE THEORIZED COMPANION STAR, THROUGH ITS GRAVITATIONAL PULL, UNLEASHES A FURIOUS STORM OF COMETS IN THE INNER SOLAR SYSTEM LASTING FROM 100,000 TO TWO MILLION YEARS. SEVERAL OF THESE COMETS STRIKE THE EARTH.
Evidence mounts for sun's companion star
April 24th, 2006
The Binary Research Institute (BRI) has found that orbital characteristics of the recently discovered planetoid, Sedna, demonstrate the possibility that our sun might be part of a binary star system. A binary star system consists of two stars gravitationally bound orbiting a common center of mass. Once thought to be highly unusual, such systems are now considered to be common in the Milky Way galaxy.
Walter Cruttenden at BRI, Professor Richard Muller at UC Berkeley, Dr. Daniel Whitmire of the University of Louisiana, amongst several others, have long speculated on the possibility that our sun might have an as yet undiscovered companion. Most of the evidence has been statistical rather than physical. The recent discovery of Sedna, a small planet like object first detected by Cal Tech astronomer Dr. Michael Brown, provides what could be indirect physical evidence of a solar companion. Matching the recent findings by Dr. Brown, showing that Sedna moves in a highly unusual elliptical orbit, Cruttenden has determined that Sedna moves in resonance with previously published orbital data for a hypothetical companion star.
............
Mysterious Twist Found in Saturn's Electric Ring
By Dave Mosher
Staff Writer
posted: 22 August 2007
08:45 pm ET
An invisible donut of trapped, hot particles surrounding Saturn is all bent out of shape--a finding that astronomers cant yet explain.
A similar "ring current" phenomenon occurs around Earth as a relatively stable donut when present, but new Cassini spacecraft images show Saturn's loop is a lopsided mess.
"It's curious that Saturn's ring current isn't symmetric," said Don Mitchell, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University who helped examine the images beamed back to Earth. "We think the solar wind is squishing the sunward side of the ring current, kind of like a wind sock."
Planets with magnetic fields can trap hot particles within their clutches to form giant electrified clouds—the ring currents—that are invisible to the naked eye.
............
Originally posted by budski
Global Warming - debunked, so they change the name to climate change.
Climate change = Weather.
We can't control the weather.
End of story.
Originally posted by BaronVonGodzilla
We can't control the weather?
Somebody better tell China they failed the other day then.
Originally posted by CONTACT
What? I am Chinese (living in China & Hong Kong), can we do that? I always think that it was the USA. eg. I believed that they planned to use a storm to blow away dust (evidents) at the 911 site (delay & changed because of the third airplane) , check this out :
Hurricane Erin, September 11, 2001
drjudywood.co.uk...
-by John Miller; Global Warming cause an Ice Age?...
The purpose of this paper is to investigate whether global warming could affect the thermohaline circulation cycle (THC) significantly enough that it could even shut it down and thus cause a shift in the climate of Europe severe enough to cause another Little Ice Age.
To answer the question about whether global warming could cause another ice age, I have divided this paper into segments ...
Originally posted by expat2368
......................
7. Global warming is over.. buy blankets.
8. Next subject... this one has been beat to death.
Originally posted by BaronVonGodzilla
Originally posted by budski
Global Warming - debunked, so they change the name to climate change.
Climate change = Weather.
We can't control the weather.
End of story.
We can't control the weather?
Somebody better tell China they failed the other day then.
Originally posted by budski
Starting a storm is not controlling the weather.
If you have definative proof that china can control the earths weather systems, then post it.
because if they could, they'd surely rule the world by now.
January 30, 1983
The New York Times
By John Noble Wilford
Something out there beyond the farthest reaches of the known solar system seems to be tugging at Uranus and Neptune. Some gravitational force keeps perturbing the two giant planets, causing irregularities in their orbits. The force suggests a presence far away and unseen, a large object that may be the long-sought Planet X.
..............
Recent calculations by the United States Naval Observatory have confirmed the orbital perturbation exhibited by Uranus and Neptune, which Dr. Thomas C. Van Flandern, an astronomer at the observatory, says could be explained by “a single undiscovered planet.” He and a colleague, Dr. Robert Harrington, calculate that the 10th planet should be two to five times more massive than Earth and have a highly elliptical orbit that takes it some 5 billion miles beyond that of Pluto – hardly next-door but still within the gravitational influence of the Sun.
Some astronomers have reacted cautiously to the 10th-planet predictions. They remember the long, futile quest for the planet Vulcan inside the orbit of Mercury; Vulcan, it turned out, did not exist. They wonder why such a large object as a 10th planet escaped the exhaustive survey by Mr. Tombaugh, who is sure it is not in the two-thirds of the sky he examined. But according to Dr. Ray T. Reynolds of the Ames Research Center in Mountain View, CA, other astronomers “are so sure of the 10th planet, they think there’s nothing left but to name it.”
At a scientific meeting last summer, 10th-planet partisans tended to prevail. Alternative explanations for the outer-planet perturbations were offered. The something out there, some scientists said, might be an unseen black hole or neutron star passing through the Sun’s vicinity. Defenders of the 10th planet parried the suggestions. Material falling into the gravitational field of a black hole, the remains of a very massive star after its complete gravitational collapse, should give off detectable x-rays, they noted; no X-rays have been detected. A neutron star, a less massive star that has collapsed to a highly dense state, should affect the courses of comets, they said, yet no such changes have been observed.
More credence was given to the hypothesis that a “brown dwarf” star accounts for the mysterious force. This is the informal name astronomers give to celestial bodies that were not massive enough for their thermonuclear furnaces to ignite; perhaps like the huge planet Jupiter, they just missed being self-illuminating stars.
Most stars are paired, so it is not unreasonable to suggest that the Sun has a dim companion. Moreover, a brown dwarf in the neighborhood might not reflect enough light to be seen far away, said Dr. John Anderson of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, CA. Its gravitational forces, however, should produce energy detectable by the Infrared Astronomical Satellite.
Whatever the mysterious force, be it a brown dwarf or a large planet, Dr. Anderson said he was “quite optimistic” that the infrared telescope might find it and that the Pioneer spacecraft could supply an estimate of the object’s mass. Of course, no one can be sure that even this discovery would define the outermost boundary of the solar system.
www.nytimes.com...
Solar System Passing Through Interstellar Cloud
Posted on: Wednesday, 23 December 2009, 13:41 CST
The solar system is passing through an interstellar cloud that physics says should not exist. In the Dec. 24th issue of Nature, a team of scientists reveal how NASA's Voyager spacecraft have solved the mystery.
"Using data from Voyager, we have discovered a strong magnetic field just outside the solar system," explains lead author Merav Opher, a NASA Heliophysics Guest Investigator from George Mason University. "This magnetic field holds the interstellar cloud together and solves the long-standing puzzle of how it can exist at all."
The discovery has implications for the future when the solar system will eventually bump into other, similar clouds in our arm of the Milky Way galaxy.
Astronomers call the cloud we're running into now the Local Interstellar Cloud or "Local Fluff" for short. It's about 30 light years wide and contains a wispy mixture of hydrogen and helium atoms at a temperature of 6000 C. The existential mystery of the Fluff has to do with its surroundings. About 10 million years ago, a cluster of supernovas exploded nearby, creating a giant bubble of million-degree gas. The Fluff is completely surrounded by this high-pressure supernova exhaust and should be crushed or dispersed by it.
"The observed temperature and density of the local cloud do not provide enough pressure to resist the 'crushing action' of the hot gas around it," says Opher.
So how does the Fluff survive? The Voyagers have found an answer.
....
originally posted by: ElectricUniverse
Since the Sun's activity has been at the lowest for the past three years than it has been for at least 100 years, and since it seems that it is not about to pick up anytime soon, we might experience another LIA ( Little Ice Age) or even an ice age unless the sun's activity picks up.
Then again, with the magnetic field of the Earth being weaker than it has been for tens of thousands of years if the Sun's activity picks up suddenly we will also be in trouble.
In another thread that I started i reported about a rogue brown dwarf that is speeding very fast throughout the galaxy, but doing more research for that thread I found out that researchers were just reporting an "unexpected secular increase of the astronomical unit, the length scale of the Solar System."
What is happening is that the distance between the planets, and the Sun is increasing unexpectedly, and this has scientists baffled.
This is a link to that thread.
www.abovetopsecret.com...
Secular increase of the astronomical unit and perihelion precessions as tests of the Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati multi-dimensional braneworld scenario
Lorenzo Iorio JCAP09(2005)006 doi: 10.1088/1475-7516/2005/09/006
Lorenzo Iorio
Viale Unità di Italia 68, 70125, Bari, Italy
E-mail: [email protected]
Abstract. An unexpected secular increase of the astronomical unit, the length scale of the Solar System, has recently been reported by three different research groups (Krasinsky and Brumberg, Pitjeva, Standish). The latest JPL measurements amount to 7 ± 2 m cy−1. At present, there are no explanations able to accommodate such an observed phenomenon, either in the realm of classical physics or in the usual four-dimensional framework of the Einsteinian general relativity. The Dvali–Gabadadze–Porrati braneworld scenario, which is a multi-dimensional model of gravity aimed at providing an explanation of the observed cosmic acceleration without dark energy, predicts, among other things, a perihelion secular shift, due to Lue and Starkman, of 5 × 10−4 arcsec cy−1 for all the planets of the Solar System. It yields a variation of about 6 m cy−1 for the Earth–Sun distance which is compatible with the observed rate of change for the astronomical unit. The recently measured corrections to the secular motions of the perihelia of the inner planets of the Solar System are in agreement with the predicted value of the Lue–Starkman effect for Mercury, Mars and, at a slightly worse level, the Earth.
www.iop.org...
Now, that's not the only unexplained phenomenon that has scientists baffled, and which affects, and will affect the dynamics of the Solar System as well as the climate on Earth.
For example, we also know that there is "an unexplained increase of the velocity of a series of spacecraft after Earth gravity assists." Not to mention the pioneer anomalies, which after much investigation has been found to be real, and something seems to be slowing down satellites/space craft when they are that far out.
Title:
Anomalies in the Solar System
Authors:
Dittus, Hansjoerg
Affiliation:
AA(ZARM, University of Bremen)
Publication:
37th COSPAR Scientific Assembly. Held 13-20 July 2008, in Montréal, Canada., p.717
Publication Date:
00/2008
Origin:
ADS
Comment:
Symposium D, session 11 (oral). Paper number: D11-0001-08
Bibliographic Code:
2008cosp...37..717D
Abstract
Several observations show unexplained phenomena in our solar system. These observations are e.g. the Pioneer Anomaly, an unexplained constant acceleration of the Pioneer 10 and 11 spacecraft, the Flyby Anomaly, an unexplained increase of the velocity of a series of spacecraft after Earth gravity assists, the recently reported increase of the Astronomical Unit defined by the distance of the planets from the Sun by approximately 10 m per century, the quadrupole and octupole anomaly which describes the correlation of the low l contributions of the Cosmic Microwave Background to the orientation of the Solar system. Lacking any explanation until now, these phenomena are still investigated intensively. In my talk I will discuss the present status of those investigations and the attempts to find reasonable explantions.
adsabs.harvard.edu...
But this is not all. I also found tbat even comets are being affected by something out there, and comets are arriving days earlier than they are supposed to.
6 The increase of the Astronomical Unit
6.1 The observation
From the analysis of radiometric measurements of distances between the Earth and the major planets including observations from Martian orbiters and landers from 1961 to 2003 a secular increase of the Astronomical Unit of approximately 10 m/cy has been reported (36) (see also the article (37) and the discussion therein).
6.2 Search for explanation
Time–dependent gravitational constant and velocity of light This increase cannot be explained by a time–dependent gravitational constant G because the ˙ G/G needed is larger than the restrictions obtained from LLR.
...
Cosmic expansion The influence of cosmic expansion by many orders of magnitude too small, see Sec.9.2. Neither the modification of the gravitational field of the Sun nor the drag of the planetary orbits due to the expansion is big enough to explain this drift.
...
The reason for this is totally unclear. One may speculate that an unknown gravitational field within the Solar system slightly redirects the incoming cosmic microwave radiation (in the similar way as a motion with a certain velocity with respect to the rest frame of the cosmological background redirects the cosmic background radiation and leads to modifications of the dipole and quadrupole parts). Such a redirection should be more pronounced for low–l components of the radiation. It should be possible to calculate the gravitational field needed for such a redirection and then to compare that with the observational data of the Solar system and the other observed anomalies.
..........................
8.2 Other anomalies?
There is one further observation which status is rather unclear bit which perhaps may fit into the other observations. This is the observation of the return time of comets: Comets usually come back a few days before they are expected when applying ordinary equations of motion. The delay usually is assigned to the outgassing of these objects. In fact, the delay is used for an estimate of the strength of this outgassing. On the other hand, it has been calculated in (44) that the assumption that starting with 20 AU there is an additional acceleration of the order of the Pioneer anomaly also leads to the effect that comets come back a few days earlier. It is not clear whether this is a serious indications but a further study of the trajectories of comets certainly is worthwhile.
arxiv.org...