Past, Current, and Pending Searches For Nemesis
Searches for Nemesis in the infrared are important because cooler stars shine in infrared light. The University of California's Leuschner Observatory failed to discover Nemesis by 1986. The Infrared Astronomical Satellite (IRAS) failed to discover Nemesis in the 1980s. The 2MASS astronomical survey, which ran from 1997 to 2001, failed to detect a star, or brown dwarf, in the Solar System. If Nemesis exists, it may be detected by Pan-STARRS or the planned LSST astronomical surveys.
In particular, if Nemesis is a red dwarf star or a brown dwarf, the WISE mission (an infrared sky survey that covered most of our solar neighborhood in movement-verifying parallax measurements) is expected to be able to find it. WISE can detect 150 Kelvin brown dwarfs out to 10 light-years. But the closer a brown dwarf is the easier it is to detect. Preliminary results of the WISE survey were released on 14 April 2011. On March 14, 2012, the entire catalog of the WISE mission was released.
Calculations in the 1980s suggested that a Nemesis object would have an irregular orbit due to perturbations from the galaxy and passing stars. The Melott & Bambach work shows an extremely regular signal, inconsistent with the expected irregularities in such an orbit. Thus, while supporting the extinction periodicity, it appears to be inconsistent with the Nemesis hypothesis, though of course not inconsistent with other kinds of dark stellar companions. Other recent scientific analysis no longer supports the idea that extinctions on Earth happen at regular, repeating intervals, and thus, the Nemesis hypothesis is no longer needed.
Read more about this topic: Nemesis (hypothetical Star)
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