The Nemesis Theory

If and when the companion is found, we suggest it be named NEMESIS, after the Greek goddess who relentlessly persecutes the excessively rich, proud, and powerful. Alternative names are: KALI, “the black”, after the Hindu goddess of death and destruction, who nonetheless is infinitely generous and kind to those she loves; INDRA, after the Vedic god of storms and war, who uses a thunderbolt (comet?) to slay a serpent (dinosaur?), thereby releasing life-giving waters from the mountains; and finally GEORGE, after the saint who slew the dragon. We worry that if the companion is not found, this paper will be our nemesis.
—Muller, Davis, and Hut, “Extinction of species by periodic comet showers”

The Nemesis Theory

As with the original “Music of the Spheres”scenario, the Nemesis Theory is an important component of Bible Black. Broadly stated, the theory proposes that the Sun has a companion star that passes through the Oort Cloud every 26 million years. The gravitational disturbance caused by this transit dislodges comets from their orbits and sends them hurtling towards the inner Solar System. When these comets bombard the Earth, extinction events occur, including the famous “asteroid” that killed the dinosaurs.

The Alvarez Hypothesis
The Nemesis Theory grew out of the late 1970s, when Nobel Laureate Luis Alvarez (1911–1988) developed an hypothesis on what killed the dinosaurs. Alvarez’s group conducted a careful study of worldwide iridium layers and found that 65 million years ago, some natural event covered the entire world with a layer of iridium. After discounting numerous sources including terrestrial volcanos and supernovae, the Alvarez group concluded that an extraterrestrial object struck the Earth. It wasn’t the rise of mammals, or gradual climate change, or a supernova that killed the dinosaurs—it was a single, traumatic catastrophe; the impact of a 5-mile wide asteroid!

When Alvarez published the paper in 1980, it was met with a variety of responses from mild curiosity to outright ridicule. Like many revolutionary theories, it took time for the scientific community to get onboard, but Alvarez staunchly defended his work. Eventually enough evidence accumulated to convince most of his critics. Today the impact theory is the dominant theory, although the timeframe has been shifted to 66 million years ago. The location of the impact is believed to be Chicxulub, Mexico.

The Nemesis Theory
One of Luis Alvarez’s friends at the University of California, Berkeley, was his former protégé, an experimental physicist named Richard A. Muller (b. 1944). In 1984 a pair of paleontologists named David Raup and Jack Sepkoski published a paper in which they presented evidence that terrestrial extinction events occur in cycles of 26 million years. Interested but skeptical, Alvarez asked Muller to critique the paper. Muller suggested their findings could be hypothetically caused by a companion star with a 26 million year orbit, one that passed close enough to the Solar System to disturb asteroids and cause periodic havoc.

The idea gained hold of Muller’s imagination, and he became obsessed with developing the hypothesis. Where was this solar companion located? How elliptical was its orbit? What mass did it require to affect the asteroid belt? Were there perhaps “invisible asteroids” made from dark matter? Did the extinction periodicity have something to do with the 33-million year “wobble” the Solar System experiences as it glides above and below the galactic plane?

Muller turned to a colleague named Marc Davis (b. 1947), an astronomer at Berkeley. With the help of Muller’s grad students, the pair developed and modeled several ideas, but couldn’t find a plausible solar companion that maintained a stable orbit which followed the necessary parameters. In late 1983 they discussed the issue with Piet Hut (b. 1952), a Dutch astrophysicist and expert in orbital mechanics. Visiting Berkeley just before the holidays, Hut found the idea fascinating, and immediately offered the “missing piece” of the puzzle: what if it wasn’t asteroids, but comets? That would mean the companion star would only have to disturb the Oort Cloud, not the much-closer asteroid belt. (The Oort Cloud surrounds the solar system with billions of comets, basically large balls of water and methane mixed with dust and rock.) Because Alvarez’s impact theory worked for asteroids or comets—both had the required mass and iridium content—the idea allowed the team to calculate a companion star with the exact parameters needed to explain a 26-million year cycle of terrestrial bombardment. Believing this companion star to be a red dwarf, they proposed several names for it, including Nemesis.

The trio drafted a paper in record time, submitting it to Nature magazine only a week later. Soon after submission, Muller was surprised to hear that another team had developed the same idea at the same time; two astronomers named Daniel Whitmire and Albert Jackson IV. He reached out to this team and compared notes, finding that his colleagues had speculated the solar companion was a brown dwarf. In April 1984, Nature published both their papers in the same issue.

Muller aggressively defended his theory for many years, publishing a layman’s book about Nemesis and revising his model to account for shifting evidence. Unfortunately for the Greek Goddess of Hubris, her star has yet to be discovered, and later research revealed that Raup and Sepkoski’s initial hypothesis was flawed: extinctions do not occur with periodicity. Nevertheless, the Nemesis Theory has a certain imaginative appeal, and the idea that our Sun has a mysterious and deadly companion remains attractive for fringe astronomers, science fiction enthusiasts, and Call of Cthulhu writers.

Scenario Modifications

When Kevin A. Ross published “The Music of the Spheres” in 1992, the Nemesis Theory was barely a decade old, and Muller’s book Nemesis: The Death Star was still in print. Ross’ astronomer Gerald Neal was born in the late 1930s, making him somewhat older than the historical Nemesis Team. Bible Black is set in 2025, which changes key aspects of the original scenario. First and foremost, the Nemesis Theory has been largely discredited. Radio astronomy and brown dwarf theory were comparatively young in 1992, and both have come a long way in the last three decades. Numerous sky surveys conducted after the original scenario was published have failed to discover a solar companion. Second, to keep Gerald Neal an appropriate age—he’s in his mid-60s in Bible Black—Neal would have to be a generation younger than the original Nemesis Team. Why would an eminent astrophysicist like Neal be fixated on an idea that developed when he was a young Ph.D. student?

The Precocious Grad Student
My solution is simple, but comes at the cost of the historical Nemesis Team. In Bible Black, Gerald Neal earned his Ph.D. in Astrophysics from Berkeley, where his mentor and thesis advisor was none other than Marc Davis. Neal was in Davis’ office the day that Muller arrived to explain his “companion star” hypothesis. In the world of Bible Black, it was Gerald Neal, not Piet Hut, who first suggested that comets were the real culprits; Piet Hut merely confirmed the idea and helped with the calculations. Additionally, it was Neal who suggested “Nemesis” as a potential name, adding it to the list generated by Muller before submitting the paper to Nature. (It was the editors of Nature who selected Nemesis from the list of candidates, which included Kali, Indra, and George.) Therefore the “original” authors of the paper were Richard A. Muller, Marc Davis, Piet Hut, and Gerald M. Neal. And while it’s unusual for a grad student to be listed as a co-author, all agreed that Neal’s contributions made him an invaluable member of the team.

This is the reason why Gerald Neal remains fascinated by Nemesis in 2025. He’s so obsessed with proving himself right that he’s traded his scientific objectivity—and sanity!—for the narcissistic delusions of Ghroth. My apologies to professors Muller, Davis, and Hut for stealing some of their valor for this fictional astrophysicist. The only consolation I offer is that Dr. Neal will definitely share his Nobel Prize with you. Oh yes, definitely.

Bible Black > Keeper’s Information
[Back to Scenario Background | Bible Black TOC | Forward to Assigning Player Characters]

Author: A. Buell Ruch
Artwork: Eclipse from Moon, by Lucien Rudaux (1874-1947)
Last Modified: 11 November 2025
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
Bible Black PDF: [TBD]