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Red dwarf stars: there are a dozen in our close neighborhood, but red dwarves are so dim that not one is naked-eye visible.

So, POD: the Sun is really a double star, with a red dwarf companion a couple of thousand a.u. away. The dwarf is just barely naked-eye visible, but there's nothing to distinguish it from any other dim star. Since it takes something like 100,000 years to orbit the sun, nobody's going to notice it moving against the stellar background.

In fact, nobody's going to notice it at all... until Friedrich Bessel starts measuring parallax (the shift of stars caused by the earth's orbit around the sun) in the late 1830s. Bessel may or may not spot it, but by the 1860s -- when the British and French start measuring every damn thing in the sky -- someone is going to check the parallax, just to be sure. Then, dear me, they'll find that the nondescript little star has a parallax measured not in arc seconds but in arc /minutes/. Heck, you can spot the shift with the naked eye, if you're incredibly patient and know exactly how to look.

Assume arguendo that this has no major effects on Earth via the Kuiper belt, long-term comets, what have you, so that human history is identical until the dwarf is discovered. [handwave] Aside from us knowing a lot more about red dwarves, are there any other effects?

For the hell of it, I'll stipulate that the dwarf has a couple of planets in orbit. No, they're not remotely earthlike -- they're gas giants, and pretty cold. (Like, the inner gas giant is just 1/20 of an au away from the dwarf... which means it gets less energy than Saturn.)

Any other knock-on effects on astronomy, or other sciences?

Any chance of paying a visit by the early 21st century? -- Okay, I can answer that one. No. Voyager, currently ~100 au away, would be less than 1/20 of the way to the dwarf. By the early 21st century we could probably launch something that could make the trip in under a century -- ion drive, solar sail, something -- but I doubt we would have; New Horizons, the Pluto probe, didn't get launched until 2007.

Oh, and: what would it be called? It'll be somewhere in the plane of the ecliptic, if that helps.

Thoughts?


Doug M.
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