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Rogue Star Changed The Earth's Orbit Says Harvard-Smithsonian Astronomer: Could It Return?

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A new theory suggests that during a violent stage of our solar system’s history, a rouge star passed to close to developing solar system and pulled our developing planets out of alignment with the sun’s equator. 
 
According to astronomer Konstantin Batygin,  Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics  (Cambridge, MA) in the Journal Nature,  this theory explains the reason the earth orbits the sun at an angle 7 degrees off the solar equator.
 
Konstantin’s theory states young stars may develop in clusters, with the disks of matter surrounding them and nearly always spreading from the equator being tugged by a neighboring star. Further their protoplanetary disk can be pulled off its equatorial orbit by a second star. He believes the rogue star is long gone and is not likely to return.
 
In the Journal Nature,  Batygin writes that the existence of gaseous giant planets whose orbits lie close to their host stars (‘hot Jupiters’) can largely be accounted for by planetary migration associated with viscous evolution of proto-planetary nebulae. Recently, observations of the Rossiter–McLaughlin effect during planetary transits have revealed that a considerable fraction of hot Jupiters are on orbits that are misaligned with respect to the spin axes of their host stars. This observation has cast doubt on the importance of disk-driven migration as a mechanism for producing hot Jupiters.
 
Geometrical set-up of the problem. This figure depicts a schematic representation of the production of misaligned close-in planets through disk- driven migration in binary systems. The adiabatic response of a self-gravitating  disk to long-term perturbations by a stellar companion is the recession of its  ascending node, as defined by the orbital plane of the stellar companion. The recession of the disk’s angular momentum vector about the stellar binary orbital angular momentum vector appears to be an excitation of the misalignment angle y between the stellar spin axis and the disk in the star’s reference frame.
Credit: Nature/Konstantin Batygin
 
Batygin  shows that misaligned orbits can be a natural consequence of disk migration in binary systems whose orbital plane is uncorrelated with the spin axes of the individual stars. The gravitational torques arising from the dynamical evolution of idealized proto-planetary disks under perturbations from massive distant bodies act to misalign the orbital planes of the disks relative to the spin poles of their host stars. 
 
As a result, Batygin suggests that in the absence of strong coupling between the angular momentum of the disk and that of the host star, or of sufficient dissipation that acts to realign the stellar spin axis and the planetary orbits, the fraction of planetary systems (including systems of ‘hot Neptunes’ and ‘super-Earths’) whose angular momentum vectors are misaligned with respect to their host stars will be commensurate with the rate of primordial stellar multiplicity.
 
Artist’s conceptualization of the dusty protoplanetary system as planets form. 
Credit: Gemini Observatory/AURA artwork by Lynette Cook.

The obliquities (angles between the planetary orbits and the stellar spins) of detected planetary orbits range from almost perfectly aligned prograde to almost perfectly aligned retrograde systems. Previously, the misalignment between planetary orbits and stellar spin axes had been attributed to post-nebular multi-body interactions. Most notably, Kozai cycles with tidal friction , planet–planet scattering, and chaotic secular excursions have been invoked as a means of producing misaligned planets. These mechanisms are probably responsible for a few specific examples (for example, the extreme eccentricity of HD80606b is almost certainly due to Kozai resonance with the stellar companion HD806078). 

 
However writes Batygin, it is unlikely that they can explain misaligned hot Jupiters as a population. For instance, the Kozai mechanism can be stifled by forced apsidal precession in multi-planet systems. Likewise, within the context of planet–planet scattering and secular chaos, the allowed parameter range is limited, because the production of close-in orbits requires the timescale for tidal capture to be considerably shorter than that for eccentricity growth, while demanding the associated tidal heating to be small enough not to over- inflate the planet beyond its Roche lobe. Additionally, the observed presence of mean-motion resonances among giant planets on wide orbits (which rely on smooth, convergent migration to congregate provides further motivation for the development of a unified model for disk migration that is capable of producing misaligned orbits.

“I think it’s an entirely plausible idea,”  Josh Winn, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge who has measured orbital tilts of several hot Jupiters, tells onlline magazine Science Now. “The best thing about it is we can test it.” If Batygin is right, Winn says, then misalignments should be just as common in solar systems that lack hot Jupiters, because tilting a disk doesn’t require the presence of a hot Jupiter. So far, NASA’s Kepler spacecraft has measured the tilt of just one multiplanet system: the three planets around Kepler 30, all of which have orbits that line up with their star’s equator. In the future, Winn plans to observe additional multiplanet systems and put Batygin’s theory to the test. 

One other multiplanet solar system has a known tilt: our own. “I think somewhere in the Milky Way, there’s a star that’s responsible for tilting us,” Batygin says who suspects the sun once had a companion star that tipped the solar nebula by , then fled the scene after the planets arose.

Citation: Konstantin Batygin
A primordial origin for misalignments between stellar spin axes and planetary orbits
Nature 491, 418–420 (15 November 2012) doi:10.1038/nature11560Received 02 November 2011 Accepted 24 August 2012 Published online 14 November 2012



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    Total 4 comments
    • Anonymous

      Never happened. Where do they get this crap?

    • Anonymous

      NASA and others are suddenly preparing the public for the official announcement that Planet X is real and has been in inner solar system since 2003.

      Planet X did NOT just suddenly show up, folks. Planet X comes around every 3,657 years; the only question each time is how its passage (not collision) will affect the earth.

      Unfortunately this time the Passage of Planet X will be catastrophic (which is the primary reason it is still not admitted as real, but that is about to change). The “elites” don’t care if YOU or YOUR family survive the Passage of Planet X, just as long as THEY do.

      Part of the “elite” strategy of surviving was keeping the news from the public, You!

      NASA is going to announce Planet X is real, probably before the end of 2012. Then, and only then, can President Obama follow up with whatever he plans to say about the reality of Planet X. Obama is likely to suggest that people prepare to help themselves and don’t expect any government to do everything (or much) for you. Self-sufficiency is what the reality of Planet X will be all about, NOT the bunkers the elite have been building and preparing since at least 1983 when Planet X was found.

      The good news: Although the pole shift the passage of Planet X will cause is not good news, there is hope. It is all up to YOU what you do or don’t do, once you are officially informed Planet X is real and approaching.

    • inkling

      I am pedantic, unfortunately, but I had to titter a bit at the opening line (… a rouge star…). Is that the shade of red, rouge? (sorry!)

    • HIDDENTEXTOR

      This subject has been published for months now at the Hidden Texts of Nostradamus.

      Right in front of our eyes (those that actually see what they are looking at)
      the crop circles have been telling us for a couple of years that our orbit is going to change, that our sun is going to grow and encompass where we once were
      that we are going to have two suns – one a gas giant, and the old one
      “eclipsed” by Mercury – that is how far away it will be
      The 1260 days of Revealtion may even BE our new orbit

      with an A.U. of about 288 million instead of the 93.1 million we have now
      simple explanation also for WHY THE MAYA CALENDAR ENDS

      if you go to
      http://www.hiddentextSofnostradamus.com
      you will see the crop circles for yourself – at no cost

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