Nearly a century and a half after Pluto’s loss of status as a fully-fledged planet; some five decades since the confirmation of the existence of Planets IX and X in the Kuiper belt, made possible only by the use of the now-ubiquitous technology of semi-sterile neutrino interferometry; and now ten years, almost to the day of this writing, after the confirmation of the so-called “wax/wane” gravitational anomaly, the direct detection of what has been termed “Nemesis” in popular media has been announced. Strictly speaking, this announcement is the pro forma admission of the various powers that be that Nemesis is real and, furthermore, information about it has been deemed safe enough for public consumption.

There were a number of confounding factors which precluded earlier detection of Nemesis, not the least being the fact that it is so far away—nearly a light-year from the Sun—but also that it is actually much more luminous than anything anyone was looking for, given the absolute lack of results in the spectrum of an object at such a distance. Nemesis is also extraordinarily massive, on the order of 15 solar masses, and yet appears to be in a very slow, almost exactly circular orbit around the sun. The implications of this are lost of the masses—or, were until recently—which are manifold and absolutely inexplicable. For one, the Sun and our entire solar system should be in orbit around Nemesis, not the other way around. Additionally, why the Sun should appear to have any significant gravitational influence on Nemesis, to the point where its orbit is nearly circular, is anyone’s guess. 

Large, even compact, rogue bodies in the outer reaches of the solar system have long been conjectured to inhabit the edges of the sun’s gravitational influence—from super-earths, to fantastically-structured ice giants, even primordial black holes, born in the first moments after the big bang—but Nemesis was not part of any conjecture.

Briefly, beyond what is written above, Nemesis has a number of truly bizarre features. They are still under tremendous scrutiny and the great distance between the Earth and Nemesis means that all measurements are necessarily delayed by approximately one year, but the following are more or less clear. 

One, the “nearly circular” orbit of Nemesis has deviations which give the point around which it orbits somewhere in the vicinity of the inner planets and not the Sun itself. Immediate speculation, met with harsh criticism from the scientific community, is that it is in orbit around Earth.

Two, Nemesis orbits the center of the solar system clockwise with respect to the Sun’s north pole, while every other object orbits counterclockwise—that is to say, Nemesis is in a nearly permanent sort of “retrograde.” What is more: There is mounting evidence that this was not always so and that, in fact, the orbital direction Nemesis follows has changed many times throughout history. Among other complications, this makes calculating the Nemesistic year impossible to calculate.

Three, Nemesis has the mass and density of a neutron star, but the radiation it emits is not in line with any known type of compact body with similar composition. In fact, its spectrum is unlike anything else yet observed in the over 500-year history of observational astronomy. The only mainstream model which accounts for a possible origin of Nemesis posits that it is a neutron star which has lost almost all of its once immense energy, but which formed approximately 2.3 trillion years ago. This is, of course, impossible, given that this is two orders of magnitude greater than the established age of the universe. 

Four, the “wobble” in the orbit of Nemesis—that is, the combination of the aforementioned irregular, nearly-circular orbit, and the fact that Nemesis appears to change its orbital direction—has been shown to correspond to certain events in human history, though these details are extremely rough. This is the primary evidence given for the idea that many details concerning Nemesis were known much earlier than the official timeline, perhaps impossibly early: Much work seems to have already been done in finding correspondences between the orbit of Nemesis and terrestrial activity. The regions of the Oort cloud cleared and scattered by Nemesis’s long sojourn at the edge of space are such that, while it is currently in “retrograde,” it was not so in the very recent past. It is thought that the current retrograde period began only a few hundred years ago, while the counterclockwise orbit was the norm for the preceding 45,000 (±2500) years.

No serious proposal for any of Nemesis's orbital dynamics has yet been proposed. Indeed, the only way to salvage any vestige previously universally-accepted theory of celestial mechanics is to accept the possibility that Nemesis simply did not exist prior to approximately 300,000 (±15,000) years ago. It is impossible for a body as massive as Nemesis to have been “captured” by the Sun's barely-detectable gravitational field one light-year out, which would require Nemesis having simply “appeared.”