"Ookie Wonderslug" wrote in message
...
I read in ScienceDaily the other day that the orbit of one of the
newly discovered minor planets indicates that the sun is part of a
binary system. The problem I see with this is that we would have seen
it by now. It can't be Alpha Centauri, it's too far away. There are no
closer stars that could be companions to Sol. If it was a brown dwarf,
it would be big enough that we would have seen it by now, wouldn't we?

So here's my idea, it's a black hole. One that has "eaten" all the
matter around it and is silent. It's not emitting anything because
it's not taking anything in. The only way to "see" it would be to
watch the entire sky until a star unexpectedly is "magnified" by the
gravitational lensing when it passed by. Since neutron stars are less
than 10 miles across, how big is the event horizon on a black hole? A
mile? Half that?

Since the Sol system is in orbit in the Milky Way galaxy,
and since there's a fair amount of jostling of stars
and dust clouds and such, it's very unlikely that such a
black hole would have a matter-free path to follow.

Sol orbits the galactic nucleus in something on the order
of once every 250 million years. The solar system's been
around for on the order of 5 billion, so we've gone round
about 20 times -- not enough, I would think, to clear a
dust-free lane even if the orbit was a repeating one.

The black hole Schwarzchild Radius (2GM/c^2) depends upon
the mass of the progenitor star. It would have to have
been a pretty big star to have gone through its entire life
cycle, right through to supernova and black hole collapse,
long enough ago to leave an undetectable remnant shell and
sweep clean the entire orbit.


I have gotten the impression that a black hole "sucks" things into it.
On tv they show them taking in entire solar systems and such. But it
seems to me that the black hole wouldn't have any more gravity than
the star that made it had to begin with. It would just be that the
star is compacted into a tiny spot. While I figure that would disrupt
the orbits of any planets around the star and cause them to either go
off into space or into the black hole. But after that has occured, it
should go dead. Shouldn't it?

The gravitational field of a black hole is
indistinguishable from that of an ordinary star of the same
mass. No sucking, no disrupting. What the local planets
have to survive though is the red giant and supernova
stages that lead to the black hole forming. Not a
particularly peaceful process.


Well, is it a theory?

Needs work, keep at it. :-)