Sol may have had a companion

Ever heard of Nemesis? A mysterious companion to our sun, causing all forms of chaos in our solar system.  

For decades, some scientists have speculated that Nemesis truly exsisted and whose gravitational tug periodically jostles comets out of their normal orbits, sending them careening toward Earth. The resulting impacts have caused mass extinctions, among other things.  

Now, a new study reports that almost all sun-like stars are likely born with companions, making a strong case  for the existence of Nemesis.

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Does the Nemesis Companion Exsist?

Nemesis - A small dark companion star to Sol, orbiting the outer reaches of the solar system, sending comets hurtling from the dark reaches of the Ort cloud towards the inner planets of the Solar System. Some of which strike Earth, said to be the cause of mass extintions throughout history. Unfortunatly for Nemesis, it's exsistance falls apart because it could not have a stable enough orbit to account for the regularity of the extintion events.

However, since a disproportionatly large amount of comets originate from the Oort Cloud, University of Louisiana astrophysicists suspect that a large object may indeed be lurking deep in the outer reaches of the Solar System.

From the IO9 article:

• A planet anywhere from one to four times the mass of Jupiter could be responsible for the gravitational influence that would create this imbalance. .... the probability that this effect is purely a statistical fluke is extremely small, which suggests there's something strange going on out there in the outer Oort.

Even though the object would be Jupiter class in size and mass, its' shere distance from the sun (in an order of 30,000 times farther away than Earth) would make it extremely difficult to discover.

Wiki reference IO9 article

Nemesis not to blame for mass extinctions

We have all heard that the fossil records show a curious cycle of every 27 million years, Earth has been bombarded so heavily as to cause a mass extinction. Some scientists blamed a star dubbed Nemesis. In a recent IO9 article, Adrian Melott of the University of Kansas and Richard Bambach of Smithsonian Institution Museum of Natural History, say that the theory that every 27 million years, Nemesis would swing through the outer system bringing with it vast quantities of material from the Ort cloud. Melott and Bambach researched the fossil records and indeed found an extremely accurate record of mass extinctions every 27 million years, further back than anyone else had researched. And that accuracy it appears, is the failing point of the Nemesis as the cause. Because the occurrences are SO regular it can not be a Nemesis object, because it is SO regular!

Melott and Bambach postulate that if Sol had a binary companion, their shared orbit around a common central point would distort the regularity of each body around the system. This means that each time Nemesis swung in, its orbit would change and the occurrence would not and could not be the same as the one before and the one after. The change might be subtle but it would be enough for the regularity of the events to be wildly different instead of every 27 million.

You can read the whole article on IO9 here