NEMESIS THE SUN’S EVIL TWIN?
What do you get if you cross the dinosaurs with millions of comets and an evil twin of our Sun that has not only wreaked havoc on Earth multiple times but has long been hidden from view? Anxious? Fearful? Maybe both? For while it may sound like a terrible joke. The intriguing punchline once caused some alarm – and raised a mystery that had astronomers hooked for quite some time.
Welcome to Nemesis, the Sun's hypothetical long-lost companion which has been speculated to be circling in the edges of the Solar System. Proposed by Richard A. Muller, an American physicist and professor of physics at the University of California, Berkeley, it gained some ground in the 1980s with the suggestion that it was behind a series of mass extinction events here on Earth.
The theory grew from a 1983 study by two palaeontologists, David Raup and Jack Sepkoski. They had analysed the extinction rates of 27,000 marine animals which perished during the past 250 million years and pointed towards five mass wipeouts since the Late Permian era, in which more than 75 per cent of species disappeared. They went on to suggest that these catastrophic extinction events
