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Originally posted by Illustronic
reply to post by loagun
We have imaged a brown dwarf with just 8 times the mass of Jupiter 500 LYs away, I'm sure we could see a brown dwarf just 1 LY away hiding in our Oort cloud.
hubblesite.org... 05/31/
Originally posted by CLPrime
reply to post by NWOnoworldorder
Alrighty, watched the video. Here's CLPrime's take
The astronomy aspects of the video are good. First of all, he does seem to know what he's doing with a telescope. He also knows that a brown dwarf should emit light mostly in the infrared range. I have argued before that a brown dwarf would be visible by now, but cooler brown dwarf are, admittedly, optically dimmer, and they would be indistinguishable from the field of stars.
Unfortunately, he also seems to be your typical conspiracy theorist (chem clouds? *sigh*), which knocks his credibility down a bit, but, if he's truly onto something, he should be able to overcome that. So, is he onto something?
Well, he is right that, where he's looking, there is nothing obvious to suggest the presence of a comet. However, it's debatable whether or not Elenin should have a tail by now. It's just entering the inner solar system, and that's when tails usually start to form. It might be some random, tiny point of light.
But, then, that doesn't account for the object he's pointing out, because that is (as far as I know) not the appearance of a comet. It actually looks like a star with some sort of accretion disk, given its elongated shape. It also matches the description of a brown dwarf, as I said, because it's very dim optically, but it becomes very visible in the infrared.
So, observationally, he has a case. Physically, not so much. This doesn't negate all of the replies I've posted on related threads stating how impossible the "Nibiru" scenario is. Give me a physically stable orbit and a reason why the brown dwarf's gravity is not perturbing the other planets and I will agree that there is possibly something to this.edit on 2-3-2011 by CLPrime because: (no reason given)edit on 2-3-2011 by CLPrime because: (no reason given)
Originally posted by CLPrime
In addition to wildespace's observations, I'm going to take the liberty of doing my usual physics/math work.
The optical photo we're shown is Pluto, some other circled objects, and one object labelled "Nibiru". Judging by the brightness of the "Nibiru" object, which seems to be, at most, half as bright as Pluto, its apparent magnitude is around 17 or 18. We'll assume it's 17 to give this object the best possible chance of being a brown dwarf.
Now, the typical absolute magnitude of a brown dwarf is in the 15 range, but it is possible for cool brown dwarfs to be as dim as magnitude 19. Let's use magnitude 20 just for the heck of it.
The equation for finding distance from apparent and absolute magnitude is:
m = M + 5(log[d] - 1)
where m = apparent magnitude
M = absolute magnitude
d = distance, in parsecs
Plugging the numbers in, we get:
17 = 20 + 5(log[d] - 1)
0.4 = log[d]
d = 10^0.4 = 2.5118864315 parsecs
This is equal to 518,114 AU.
This is the closest a brown dwarf could possible be to look the way it does in the image.
Obviously, there is no possible way for a brown dwarf this dim to be anywhere near our solar system.
Originally posted by Xcalibur254
reply to post by loagun
The Wikipedia article is referring to brown dwarfs outside of the galaxy. A brown dwarf has a similar composition to a gas giant and as such has the same reflectivity. As Jupiter is visible to the naked eye and a brown dwarf is several magnitudes larger than Jupiter, it would be visible to the naked eye quite some distance away. Throw a telescope into the mix and a brown dwarf would be visible to the point where it would be impossible for it to reach us in two years.