"If there was any chances to be any threat to the earth. Would NASA do let people know and go out in the public to warn?"
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Question
I just read an article that stated in March 2010 NASA launched the WISE telescope to look for the Nemesis star. Is the WISE telescope still up there looking for Nemesis or not? Links from the NASA website suggest our sun may have a binary counterpart. The NASA site seems to have some misleading information.
There is a confusion here because the name Nemesis is used for two entirely different objects. One is for a known main-belt asteroid, 128 Nemesis, which was discovered by J. C. Watson in 1872 and is much like other main-belt asteroids. I imagine it was among the many asteroids observed by the WISE space infrared telescope. Primarily, however, Nemesis is known as the name that was suggested for a hypothetical brown-dwarf companion star to the Sun on an extremely long orbit, with period of roughly 25 million years. This companion object was suggested as a possible explanation for what may be periodicities in the rate of comets striking the Earth. However, we have known for a couple of decades, as a result of previous infrared sky searches, that this hypothetical Nemesis does not exist. WISE was not launched to search for a companion star to the Sun.
David Morrison
Astrobiology Senior Scientist
November 25, 2010
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