Hills Cloud - Star Perturbations and Stellar Companion Hypotheses

Star Perturbations and Stellar Companion Hypotheses

Besides the galactic tide, the main trigger for sending comets into the inner Solar System is believed to be interaction between the Sun's Oort cloud and the gravitational fields of nearby stars or giant molecular clouds. The orbit of the Sun through the plane of the Milky Way sometimes brings it in relatively close proximity to other stellar systems. For example, during the next 10 million years the known star with the greatest possibility of perturbing the Oort cloud is Gliese 710. This process also serves to scatter the objects out of the ecliptic plane, potentially also explaining the cloud's spherical distribution.

In 1984, Physicist Richard A. Muller postulated that the Sun has a heretofore undetected companion, either a brown dwarf or a red dwarf, in an elliptical orbit within the Oort cloud. This object, known as Nemesis, was hypothesized to pass through a portion of the Oort cloud approximately every 26 million years, bombarding the inner Solar System with comets. However, to date no evidence of Nemesis has been found, and many lines of evidence (such as crater counts), have thrown its existence into doubt. Recent scientific analysis no longer supports the idea that extinctions on Earth happen at regular, repeating intervals. Thus, the Nemesis hypothesis is no longer needed.

A somewhat similar hypothesis was advanced by astronomer John J. Matese of the University of Louisiana at Lafayette in 2002. He contends that more comets are arriving in the inner Solar System from a particular region of the Oort Cloud than can be explained by the galactic tide or stellar perturbations alone, and that the most likely cause is a Jupiter-mass object in a distant orbit. This hypothetical gas giant planet has been nicknamed Tyche. One all-sky survey using parallax measurements in order to clarify local star distances, the WISE mission, is currently underway with part of its mission being to help with either proving or disproving the Tyche hypothesis.