sasazuka - 2014-01-10
I think my favourite detail is the one in the preview image. It's a digital image on a computer screen where you can zoom in and out to get a closer look on anything, so what do they do? They use a magnifying glass... on a computer screen.
I'm not an astrophysicist so I don't know how close a brown dwarf star can get to the solar system before it could be detected, but I'm gonna guess that, if a brown dwarf star was less than one astronomical unit (the average distance between the Earth and our sun), people would notice and it wouldn't be a secret. I'm not sure if a brown dwarf start that close would destroy the Earth or all life on it, but it would almost certainly have some kind of measurable gravitational effect and I believe that they'd also have some kind of radio signature (or is that just a pulsar?) and it would, of course, be visible, if not to the naked eye at least to anyone with a telescope, and you can go to many stores and buy a telescope without a super secret government security clearance.
That's where all conspiracy theories about "great big things of destruction" heading towards Earth, or giant alien crafts have replaced the planet Venus, and the government (or Illuminati or whatever) won't tell us about it fall apart: the night sky is visible to everyone who cares to look and anything noticeable to conspiracy nuts would also be visible to anyone else and anything of serious concern wouldn't stay a secret for long. (Unless you take the position that the entire night sky is a holographic projection or simulation, which I have seen some conspiracy believers put forth, but that's a whole other level of cloudcuckoolander where any normal logic won't apply.)
In this case, I think the dark spot just has something to do with how the digital camera compensates for an object as bright as the sun so as to not overexpose the rest of the image.
However, I think if you're going to spout crazy astronomy, the best way to do it is to look as eccentric as possible, so, for that, the guy talking about his discovery in bed gets my full endorsement.
As a footnote, I have to thank StealthWaveF22Raptor for "liking" this video and bringing it to my attention.
|