docs.: terrorista cósmico

[...]"Now I took the initiative. "Let's see if you are right that the star would be pulled away from the sun. We can calculate how big the orbit would be." I wrote Kepler's laws of gravitational motion on the blackboard. The major diameter of an elliptical orbit is the period of the orbit, in this case 26 million years, raised to the 2/3 power, and multiplied by 2. My Hewlett-Packard 11C pocket calculator quickly yielded the answer: 176,000 astronomical units, i.e., 176,000 times as far as the distance from the Earth to the sun, about 2.8 light-years. (A light-year is the distance that light travels in one year.) That put the companion star close enough to the sun so it would not get pulled away by other stars. Alvarez nodded. The theory had survived five minutes, so far.

"It looks good to me. I won't mail my letter." Alvarez's turnaround was as abrupt as his argument had been fierce. He had switched sides so quickly that I couldn't tell whether I had won the argument or not. It was my turn to say something nice to him, but he spoke first. "Let's call Raup and Sepkoski and tell them that you found a model that explains their data."

So was born the Nemesis hypothesis, though I had no idea at the time where this would lead me."

-Luis Walter Alvarez / Richard A.Muller -