how to defile astronomy in one easy step
Normally, the doomsday theories about 2012 are the realm of my friend and co-author Dr. O’Neill. In fact, the clip from Penn & Teller below comes from an episode that features his explanation of the death by solar flare myth, and he created a small series of extremely popular articles on the 2012 craze for Universe Today. But despite my fear of being brewed alive into a vat of Earl Grey tea for wandering into Ian’s turf (he is British after all), I just couldn’t keep from making a comment about this…
You’re serious? A brown dwarf careening into our solar system? I really don’t think Dr. Rand knows what a brown dwarf actually is, probably because he has an honorary PhD which has nothing to do with space or astronomy. If he did, he would know that if an object as vast and massive as he has in mind was in the immediate vicinity, amateur astronomers all over the world would be training their telescopes on it every night and world class observatories would be churning out countless multi-gig 5,000 pixel wide images of its turbulent surface as they jump at the chance to study this transitional form between a star and a gas giant.
A brown dwarf can be considered a stellar object but it’s more like a runway gas giant that really wanted to be a star. It can fuse deuterium or lithium in its core but it doesn’t have the heft to ignite the process of hydrogen fusion we see in stars. Its gases are searing hot, but in the range we would expect from a gas giant orbiting way too close to its parent star. And while it may not be big enough to crunch hydrogen into helium, brown dwarfs still tip the scales at a whopping 13 to 80 Jupiter masses, or between 4,100 and 25,500 Earths. Rand is right about one thing. A close brush with one of these monsters would be catastrophic at best. We could be hurled out of our orbit, sent into the Sun or just thrown out of the solar system altogether. But here’s a good reason why we’d know if there’s a brown dwarf lurking around our neighborhood…
As we know from basic astronomy, Jupiter is the biggest planet in our solar system and has more than twice the mass of all the other planets combined. It’s immense gravity rules the movement of comets and NEOs for hundreds of millions of miles. Now imagine something at least 13 times bigger. As it plows through the Oort Cloud and the Kupier Belt, we’d quickly notice evidence of cosmic carnage as it throws around icy rocks the size of cities. Even Jupiter could find itself facing a very grim fate or being knocked into a backwards orbit like WASP-17. A brown dwarf would rearrange our solar system and because it would be the second biggest and most massive object within a few light years, we could see every minute of its approach with ease.
What Rand, his like-minded colleagues and fans are doing, is the equivalent of standing in the middle of an empty highway and warning that a runaway truck is about to hit us any second now. They don’t know where it will come from or that we could see it from a mile away, but they know it’s supposed to come. And wouldn’t you know it. it’s supposed to kill us all according to an allegedly prophesied date and time. The fatalism coming from the 2012 movement easily rivals that of Christian fundamentalists warning the world that the End Times are now upon us and in the next few years, the world will come to an end.
Well, to be fair, it could be worse. They could’ve made a mini-series based on such a complete and total lack of elementary scientific understanding about brown dwarfs and gravity, it sends astronomers and science writers into a state of shock within the first thirty seconds of the trailer. Or maybe they did…
