Another reason that some are looking for something big, perhaps even a companion star, larger but farther out, has to do with the fact that
our sun itself is accelerating in its motion across the sky. Over the last two hundred years, a period of relatively accurate modern measurements, it has been found that the sun has increased its motion across the sky from about 50.1 arc seconds per year to 50.3 arc seconds per year. While this might not sound like much, it means that the rate at which it takes the sun to move 360 degrees (1,296,000 arc seconds - a complete orbit across the sky) has gone from 25,868 years to 25,765 years. That represents a reduction in the sun's possible binary orbit period of 100 years in just the last two centuries! This is a large effect with astronomical implications.
Few people are aware of the sun's accelerating motion because it has been obscured by an archaic precession theory, which dictates the sun cannot move. In 1543 Copernicus published De Revolutionibus, bringing back the old Greek heliocentric system (lost in 300BC) and fixing the sun as the "immovable center of the universe". In doing so, he effectively explained away all motion of the sun by saying it only "appeared" to move relative to the equinox or background stars, due to a "wobble" of the earth's axis. He, and others to follow, would claim that all motion of the sun was a vestige of a wobbling earth axis, and the sun, like the fixed stars, could not move.
A few hundred years after Copernicus, Sir Isaac Newton gave us the "lunisolar theory of precession", reasoning that it must be the huge gravity of the sun, and the nearby gravity of the moon, both pulling on an oblate earth causing the axis to change orientation by about 50 arc seconds per year. He assumed that only an axis that wobbled this much would cause the equinox to occur 50 arc seconds sooner every year (making the background stars appear to shift this much, a.k.a. precession). In his mind, a wobbling axis was the only reason we saw the sun move backwards across the sky. In other words, he thought solar motion was all an illusion, just as Copernicus had stated. This was long before anyone conceived of a galaxy, or the idea that the sun could move around the galaxy.
Newton's equations never completely worked. Specifically,
they couldn't explain why the sun "appeared" to move "faster" across the sky each year. Many scientists tried to fix Newton's formula by adding in thousands of variables beyond just the moon and sun. They included forces for the other major planets, asteroids, comets, atmospheric effects, etc., but the equation still didn't predict the acceleration. Finally, around the year 1900, the great astronomer Simon Newcomb said he didn't know why the sun moved faster each year but found that by adding .000222 arc seconds per year, the precession calculation could come very close to predicting the actual rate of the sun's observed motion. This mathematical plug allowed sailors and others who needed to know the exact position of the sun to better navigate. And so it went, until radios, computers, satellites, GPS, and other forms of navigation completely negated the need to measure the sun's motion. Today, almost no one needs to know the precession rate anymore because no one navigates by the sun. Thus, it doesn't matter how much the sun moves each year - or does it?
It's our pleasure to welcome Walter Cruttenden, author of Lost Star of Myth and Time, as our featured author this month. Walter is the Director of the Binary Research Institute in California and has a background in math and science. His book...
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