Name: THE SUN'S EVIL TWIN | The Universe (Season 6) | History
Uploaded: 2020-03-19T17:00:08.000Z
Duration: 5 min 49 s
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NARRATOR: Of the billions of stars twinkling overhead,

Modal verbs - B1

one may be a scourge to life on Earth, an evil twin

is a dark, still undiscovered star orbiting our sun.

And every 26 million years, it triggers a disaster.

surrounded by this enormous cloud of comets.

And so these successive passages of the sun's companion

would send comets into the inner solar system.

NARRATOR: What follows is death on a colossal scale.

It is now widely accepted that a rock from space

caused the end of the age of dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

But astronomer, Richard Muller, has proposed

there's a star orbiting the sun at a 26 million-year period.

Almost no other assumptions need to be made.

NARRATOR: Muller believes that as Nemesis nears the sun,

its gravitational disturbance sends comets flying

The resulting impacts have been the source

of many major extinction events in Earth's history.

Muller explains how the theory came about.

came across something that seemed utterly insane.

NARRATOR: The discovery of a 26 million-year pattern

of extinctions seemed impossible to explain by any process

RICHARD MULLER: This is the sort of thing

It means there's something we don't understand.

So I set about trying to figure out what that was.

NARRATOR: Muller made an astonishing proposal.

The only logical cause of these periodic extinctions

is a cosmic stalker that orbits our sun every 26 million years,

In short, a Death Star companion to our sun.

RICHARD MULLER: If this star is discovered, it is so important.

It was a major player in the evolution of life on Earth.

Without this, perhaps the dinosaurs would still be here.

itself could owe its existence to the Nemesis Death Star.

After all, each mass extinction wiped out vast numbers

of species, but each also cleared the way for new species

RICHARD MULLER: Now why haven't we found it yet?

Actually, there are quite a few astronomers

who don't pay very much attention to this

NARRATOR: Enter WISE, the orbiting Wide-field Infrared

Survey Explorer, a powerful new tool that just might

The reason that WISE is going to be so good

NARRATOR: By measuring heat instead of light,

infrared scanners can make warm but dark objects easy to spot.

The nice thing about looking in the infrared

The temperature on the surface of Jupiter

with the 450-degree below 0 temperature of space.

The hot spots of the race car are sort of

like warm, glowing objects out in the cold depths of space

This is a whole new way of discovering objects, objects

too faint to be seen through a normal optical telescope

but bright enough to be detected in the infrared.

But in the search for Nemesis, the results

The WISE survey is going to take a long time to analyze,

simply because there's a huge amount of data that had

RICHARD MULLER: About half of the Nemesis candidates

But in the next few years, we expect the theory will be

Until that time, it is and should be controversial.

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THE SUN'S EVIL TWIN | The Universe (Season 6) | History

ultimately

sort

assume

insane