This is a thread about Chuck's idea concerning Barnard's Star.

The problem we've mulled over is whether a 'known' star could be a much closer object than has been previously thought. So, like the difference between a bright light up on a hillside compared with a very much dimmer light at the bottom of a night-time garden, how would you differentiate between the two, given no other reference points? In the same way that your mind came sometimes play tricks on you, could science have been fooled into believing that a particular star was a much more distant object than it actually is.

There’s a precedent for this a year or so ago. Scientists realised that a galactic field star was in fact one of the Sun’s nearest neighbours. This relatively dim red dwarf star had been mistaken for a much most distant mainstream star. So, could a stellar companion, the ‘Dark Star’, have already been catalogued by astronomers, but misidentified. I certainly think this is possible. Chuck has gone further, and has identified a candidate star which might prove to be a companion brown dwarf.

The distances of stars are measured compared to each other, and make use of the parallax of the Earth. In other words, the relative positions of a given star are located six months apart, when the Earth is on opposing sides of the Sun. By seeing how that relative position has changed, and taking into account the movement of the Earth around the Sun, astronomers can calculate the star’s distance.

Chuck’s candidate object is Barnard’s Star (also known as Munich 15040), which was discovered in 1916. Importantly, it has the greatest proper motion of any star in the sky, at 10.27 seconds of arc per year. Compare this with the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, whose proper motion is a third this value, at 3.75 seconds of arc. Stars move around, not just across the sky, but with reference to one another. Generally speaking, celestial objects that are nearer to us appear to move faster than objects at a greater distance. So, common sense would dictate that Barnard’s Star should be closer to us than Proxima Cantauri. But, Proxima Centauri is closer at 4.2 light years, compared to 5.8 light years for Barnard’s Star.

Barnard’s Star is moving so quickly that it will shift its position in the sky by the equivalent of the diameter of the full moon (as viewed from Earth) in 190 years. Not only that, but it is moving rapidly towards the Sun too, at about 100 kilometres per second. Barnard’s Star is also a rather dim star, and has only 0.0005 the luminosity of the Sun. It is known to be a red dwarf, and has an irregular motion, leading some to suspect that it has a dimmer companion. Tantalisingly, it is located in the part of the sky that I have identified in my book as the probable location of the Dark Star.

Is it possible that this star has been incorrectly identified, and that its distance from the Sun is actually much, much closer?

There are a number of very favourable things about Chuck's proposition. The location, the speed of transit across the heavens (5 moon widths in 1000 years seems about right for an elliptical orbit viewed end-on), the fact that this is a feeble dwarf star. My gut feeling is that this might ring true on a number of fronts. BUT...To go down this path is to propose that a number of astronomers have performed an almighty balls-up in their estimation of the distance of Barnard's Star, not least of whom is Barnard himself. This seems an unlikely possibility.

However, a number of factors should be considered. Firstly, in 1916 brown dwarfs hadn't even been dreamed of. As far as astronomers were concerned, stars were like our Sun, perhaps a bit smaller sometimes, usually bigger. Astronomers at that time thought planets were planets, and stars were stars. they hadn't considered the possibility that there might be failed stars, or hot Jupiters, or light-emitting planets, or any of these exotic objects which could be called 'Dark Stars'.

As such, when a new star was found and calculations carried out, it would be realistic of the astronomers of the time to fit the data into their pre-conceived notions of how things worked. So they'd expect Barnard's Star to be a bright stellar object at a good distance, not a dim planetary-stylke brown dwarf within the solar system. Their findings might reflect their working assumptions. Hell, it happens! Then the initial data is carried along down the years as part of received wisdom.

The other interesting thing is that this star wobbles, suggesting a companion. Well, that might also suggest that this object is following a more complex trajectory with regard to, say, its movement around the Sun...

I'll put this up onto the Dark Star board where several more mathematical folk might pick this up and do the maths, particularly my Italian astronomy student friend. It's a rather daring idea; and I can see why it's been previously dismissed, Chuck. The difficulty is getting people to look at the idea without laughing their socks off.

Proxima Centarui's proper motion that I mentioned might actually be 0.75 seconds of arc. I have two different figures... from the same astronomy book!

You have to have "credentials" to be taken seriously. Good theory Chuck.

I'm waiting to hear from Mattia, Chuck. He's a good friend, and an astronomy/astrophysics undergraduate in Padua, Italy. He should be able to help with your questions, or at least guide me towards answering them.

I posted what I'd written here up amongst my Dark Star researcher's group. Mostly they interpreted what I wrote in terms of their own take on these things, but I had this very positive piece of mail from Walter Cruttenden, who is in contact with some very esteemed astronomers, like Geoff Marcy, the exoplanet hunter.

Again, he's making points in terms of his own take on all this, but I think you should take a look. He makes some interesting points, and is far from dismissive.

------------------------------------------------------->

Here's a reply to this item, which I also placed on my Dark Star Planet X Google group, from the Californian popular science author and producer Walter Cruttenden:

Hi Andy – Nice to see you write this. The possibility that our sun might have a visible companion, perhaps Barnard’s star or another nearby star is not out of the question. The latest estimates of solar system speed by people like Reg Cahill, a top astrophysicist in Australia that measured our motion against the CMB, indicate our SS may be moving much much faster than heretofore believed. Such scenarios are further opened up by new gravity research.

One visible star we have explored in depth here at the Binary Research Institute is Sirius, because the Sirius system is the heaviest in local space and there is so much myth and folklore describing this star as “our second sun”. According to Hamlet’s Mill Sirius is also referred to as Nibiru the “crossing star”, the brightest star in the sky. Indeed, this star acts suspiciously like a companion as it hardly moves in relation to the solstices and equinox despite precession while it crosses the path of other stars.(see Jed Buckwald, professor of history of science at Caltech http://pr.caltech.edu/periodicals/EandS/articles/LXVI4/buchwald.html ).

Think of one of those Einstein grids and how objects flow around the heavy objects that make the biggest dent in the space-time continuum – this is what our sun might be doing relative Sirius, our heaviest neighbor. Scenarios for a dark star companion and a nearby visible star companion are outlined in my book Lost Star of Myth and Time. Because of new research re speed and SS orientation and gravity, we at BRI now believe a visible star scenario is the most likely possibility. This is not to say there might not be a few Saturn or Jupiter type objects still to be found in the outer SS, but these objects do not move the SS like another star would. We are now working with some of the top astronomers in the world to develop new constraints for visible star scenarios.

Anyway, great to see you highlighting this possibility. Expect to see more and more credible research in this area over the next few years. Stay bold!

Cheers

Walter Cruttenden
Binary Research Institute

Hee Hee. I kind of knew this would happen. Okay, the equation is

M=m+5log10.do/d

And Mattia helpfully writes the following to explain it: (!!!)

"I hope you mean the absolute magnitude with relative luminosities, if not
tell me I will search better, now I am in fast, this is so: where m is the
apparent magnitude, d-zero is 10parsec, moreless 32.616 light-years (Nibiru
should be now at 8 light-hours now.. ;) and d is the distance of the
body to here. Or if you want the specific emissivity F, you can find use the
same log as argument the quotient between the ray of the star and its
distance and then plus 5log of the specific intensity."

I'll try and figure this out...Not promising anything though

Walter came out with his book last year, and proposed that a brown dwarf was orbiting the Sun. His particular version of this BD was a much bigger one than mine (fwoorrr), so much so that it can't possibly have escaped detection. His 80 Jupiter-mass BD was needed because he proposed that the Precession effect was illusory; that there was no actual wobble around the Earth's axis. Instead, the constellations shifted becasue the solar system was moving around a shared centre of gravity between the Sun and this Dark Star.

Of course, for this to be the case, the Dark Star had to be massive, so he chose the highest possible value of mass without the thing becoming a fully-fledged star. For me, this doesn't work, and I argued against this possibility prior to the release of the book. But, Walter and his colleagues at the Binary Research Institute are a serious bunch of guys, and have some major resources at their disposal. They also have the ear of some astronomers who normally avoid us alternative types.

Reading Walter's e-mail I concluded that he has realised that the Dark Star/precession link is rather unlikely. Instead, he now seems to be considering the possibility that a neighbouring star has some kind of relationship with our Sun, creating this movement through the heavens that provides the apparent Precessional effect.

If he's right (and I don't really see how this will work either, because the influence of the Sun is only about 1 light year), then he would be studying our neighbouring star in some detail...hence his interest in your idea about Barnard's Star. I can see how the Sun might be part of a local cluster of stars, and shift through the heavens in a non-linear way as a result. But why would this effect be just 25, 000 years per cycle? It seems too short a time period. Objects in the outer Oort Cloud, for instance, orbit the Sun in millions of years, so a pattern of star interaction would presumably be greater still. Also, such an effect would be negated by the more considerable gravitational pull of the galactic core; this tidal effect would be an over-riding factor.

Anyhow, it'll be interesting to see what Walter and his colleagues come up with.

Okay, here's some more mail along similar lines. I've replied, trying to focus these guys a bit more on your original hypothesis. Peolpe really do read things in respect of what they're thinking they should be reading, don't they? I have this chap's paper if anyone's interested in reading it, but it seems to be dealing with Walter's precessional stuff, as described above. By the way, sorry this is getting a bit heavy, physics wise. Inevitable really.


I have taken the liberty of CCing Andy and Walter. The attached paper answers
"no" to the question regarding whether Barnard's star could be the Sun's
"unseen"
or dark twin. I base this on the assumption that the precession of the
equinoxes
is a side effect of the Sun's orbit about an unseen central attractor, or more
precisely about their mutual center of mass. If so, then Barnard's star's large
proper motion is too small by a factor of 4.9. Quoting from my paper:

2.1 No star is seen with sufficient proper motion.

The present (inverse) precession rate of the equinoxes
is 71.58 years per degree. The fastest moving star in
the sky is Barnard's star, and it takes 349.5 years to
move one degree in proper motion. Therefore Barnard's
star cannot be the central attractor at the focus of the
Sun's imputed orbit if this orbit is the cause of the
precession.

There are three possible explanations as to why we do
not see this fast-moving unseen star. (1) It is a
black hole. (2) It is a cold dark star or a compact
cluster of cold dark stars. (3) The Sun is at the
center of a cosmic lens and the unseen star is outside
that lens but inside its focal distance. A cosmic lens
is defined as a volume of space in which the speed of
light is slower inside than outside. No light source
outside the lens and inside the focal distance (the
invisibility zone) can be imaged with an optical system
located inside the lens that is focused at infinity as
telescopes, cameras, and eyeballs are focused when they
look at the sky.

Since I wrote that paper, I found three minor flaws in it.

(1) I had failed to distinguish between lunisolar precession and planetary
precession. I used the usual formula for general precession, which is the
combination of the two components, and I equated it with lunisolar precession.
In other words, I ignored the planetary precession. This is a minor error
because the planetary precession is more than a hundred times smaller than the
general precession. Even so, if I were to rewrite this paper today, I would
separate the two components and use only the lunisolar precession for the Sun's
orbit analysis.

(2) I used the usual 3rd-order polynomials found in Meeus for the general
precession, and since then I have become aware of 6th-order polynomials in
"Numerical expressions for precession formulae and mean elements for the Moon
and
the planets" by J.L. Simon, P. Bretagnon, et. al., Astronomy and Astrophysics,
282, 663-683 (1994).

(3) When I optimized the solar orbital elements for twelve selected
eccentricities (Figure 14), I constrained exact agreement only at the present
epoch. If I were to rewrite this paper, I would also constrain exact agreement
at the epoch of 1 CE.

Best regards,
Glen Deen

It's a neat idea (precessional effect), but flawed because the size of the brown dwaqrf is necessarily too great to achieve such an effect. It would be a naked yeye object in the heavens; a true binary star really.

Making some progress with Mattia. He's also starting to get his computer messed about with, which is interesting given what we're working on here. Anyhow, he replies:



"Absolute magnitude (MV) 13.26 , this is the absolute visual magnitude of the
"Barnardian" as I say me, and it is 9.57 the apparent one so in proportion
if we would have a body like this ministar at 500 AU we should have -4.82
of apparent magnitude. And if we take the brown dwarf Gliese229 of Mv=8.18
at a distance of 19 ly, at 500AU we have mv=12.82, where with mv I sign the
apparent magnitude, if we take the smallest brown dwarf known that is Cha
110913-773444 we have mv=Apparent magnitude (V) +21.59 at 163ly so Mv=15.52
with my little program in excel I made now in a quarter of hour, so not
precise, but quite good and at 500UA is mv=-2.52 (mars is mv -2.8!). So i
don't know this is what you wanted to find, but looking at this, HST could
have not missed such bright body or one could think that between -4.82 and
9.57......and 12.82 amd 9.57, yes if we watch only brighness a Barnard Star
could be mistaken with a Brown Dwarf, but at the end the spectra cut the
misunderstanding, 'cause the spectra of a nuclear furnace like a star is
very different from a not-nuclear body like a brown-dwarf, even if the brown
dwarf could be not properly a brown-dwarf but a sort of misogenous-star and
so a new problem could come."

Some useful data there, but he is answering a different question, regaring how a 'real' brown dwarf would look at 500AU. So I've pressed him to go a bit smaller, and sent him this clarification and request:


"Thanks for all the data, Mattia.

Itr's hard to put into words what I'm trying to achieve. Some other researchers have misunderstood what I'm aiming at here. I think this is a difficult idea to grasp, and certainly too difficult for my calculations anyhow. You seem to be mving along the right lines with absolute and apparent magnitude, and I am keeping up with you.

Here's the bit that we're missing. I think that the Dark Star is a sub-stellar object below the current range for any brown dwarfs so far categorised. It is more like a warm Jupiter. It's much, much less luminous than the Gliese Brown Dwarf. So, putting things another way...if Jupiter were to be placed at 500AU, would its apparent luminosity be about the same as the actual luminosity of Barnard's Star? How much bigger in mass would a Jupiter at 500AU have to get before it became as luminous as Barnard's Star? This way of looking at it might be more useful.

I recognise totally what you're saying about the spectroscopic analysis of the star in question, that Barnard's Star is a red dwarf as determined by this kind of analysis, and that it's distance has been determined by parallax measurements since 1916. But...its proper motion is just so big that someone, somewhere might have made a big mistake. It might turn out that barnard's Star is a Jupiter like world at 500AU, or thereabouts.

So, sorry to hassle you Mattia, but how does Jupiter's luminosity vary if it were moved deeper into the outer solar system? At 500AU, how massive a sub-brown dwarf would there have to be to have an apparent magnitude of 9.57? An interesting idea perhaps?"


Let's see what he comes up with, that is if his computer doesn't get totally knobbled by whoever's messing about with him at the moment.