Nemesis` Path Is Calculated

January 29, 1985

A possible location of Nemesis, the star blamed by some scientists for mass extinctions on the Earth every 26 million years, has been calculated to be in the constellation Draco, not far from the Little Dipper.

The calculation has been performed by Dr. Armand H. Delsemme, a Belgian- born astronomer at the University of Toledo, in Ohio, based on the orbits of comets that seem to have been disrupted from their normal orbits.

Delsemme has assumed that the orbits of the 126 comets least altered by close passage of planets would still show the effects of disruption by passage of a small star or very large planet through the outer reaches of the solar system.

According to a group at the University of California, in Berkeley, periodic penetration of the cloud of comets surrounding the solar system by a star they have named Nemesis scatters the comets, sending millions of them plunging toward the Earth and other planets.

The resulting impacts, they theorize, would account for periodic extinctions, including that of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

Delsemme has calculated the most probable path of the star around the sun from a lopsided distribution of comet orbits.

Sun Sentinel Articles