The great news is that the journal Astronomy has just accepted my paper on the Jupiter Mass Binary Objects (JuMBOs) and the fantastic news is, I don’t have to pay to have it published open access, which these days is somewhere around £1000-£2000. I’ll add the link to the paper below when it appears.
As you know, quantised inertia predicts there is a minimum acceleration in nature of around 2x10^-10 m/s^2. This is such a small acceleration that it would take the lifetime of the universe to get from zero to the speed of light (there a big clue to something right there). How do we test this? Look where nature tests the limit. Stars at the edge of galaxies are doing that and move faster to stay above this minimum, that’s why they orbit faster than expected, not because they contain invisible dark matter. Galaxy clusters, wide binaries and even our nearest neighbour Proxima Centauri all hover just above this limit and these are all on different scales, thus proving that the reason is not dark matter since this has to be spread out specifically on galactic scales.
When a paper was published by McCaughrean and Pearson (2023) finding what looked like 42 wide binaries in the Orion nebula, I thought “I’ll bet they too hover just above the QI minimum.” Sure enough, when I checked, they did! QI never fails. Hence the plot below which shows the separation of each binary (x axis) against the orbital acceleration (y). As they get wider, they still stay above the minimum predicted by QI (red line, but see the caveat below).
I always have the confident feeling on testing QI that it is going to work, but it is still a great thrill when it does. There are a couple of data points that are strictly below the QI minimum but this minimum also has an uncertainty, mostly due to uncertainties in the cosmic scale.
In any good paper, there’s always a testable prediction and a caveat. The QI prediction is that the widest of these binary objects should be orbiting up to 70 metres per second faster than expected and this prediction could be tested by the HARPS (High Accuracy Radial Velocity Planet Searcher) telescope which is used to spot exoplanets and can determine orbital speeds, they say, to an accuracy of 1 m/s. The main caveat is that we need to find more of these JuMBOs to be sure they are binary objects and not just coincident objects. Their being just random coincidence is very unlikely, as stated in the observational paper, because the line of sight points out of the galaxy so there isn't much situated behind them, but you know sceptics! I've been through quite a long, and useful, review process on this one so it's great to end the year with a success.
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References
Pearson, S.G. and M.J. McCaughrean, 2023. Jupiter mass binary objects in the Trapezium cluster. https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.01231
