Hyperdimensional FAIL

This just in: WISE is all done.

        The Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission ran out of LH2 last October, but was given a short non-cryogenic life-extension called NEOWISE. That, too, has now ended.

        Launched into polar orbit from Vandenburgh in December 2009, the telescope discovered 20 comets, more than 33,000 asteroids, and 134 near-Earth objects (NEOs.)

        It's the NEOs that interested—or at least, should have interested—Richard Hoagland, because the NEO that WISE didn't find is a specific requirement of his pet theory, Hyperdimensional Physics.

        Writing in chapter 2 of Dark Mission, Hoagland congratulated himself on spotting what he said was a linear relationship between the infrared emission of a planet (exactly the kind of emission WISE was looking for) and its angular momentum. He wrote:

When one graphs the total angular momentum of a set of objects, such as the radiating outer planets of this solar system (plus Earth and the sun) against the total amount of internal energy each object radiates to space, the results are striking [Fig 2.7].

        Well, figure 2.7 is reproduced below and it doesn't show what he says it shows. The y-axis is not the total energy each object radiates, but its specific luminosity—in other words, luminosity per unit mass. Likewise the x-axis is not total angular momentum but also angular momentum per unit mass.

The diagram is taken from The New Solar System by Sky Publishing. Undeterred as ever by copyright ownership, Hoagland slaps a © 1998 The Enterprise Mission on it. In fact, the diagram was created as long ago as 1990. Some 30 additional moons have been discovered since then, rendering the whole exercise moot.

        Hoagland apparently doesn't notice that his diagram doesn't show what he says it does, as he blunders on worrying about why the Sun isn't on the same straight line as the five planets. If the hyperdimensional model is correct, he writes, it ought to be. He continues:

The obvious answer to this dilemma is that that the hyperdimensional model is simply wrong. The less obvious conclusion is that we're missing something—like additional planets.
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So the first implicit prediction of the hyperdimensional model was that eventually, observatories would find one massive planet in a prograde orbit, or two smaller solar system members in retrograde orbits.

        Well, "eventually" means RIGHT NOW, because if these massive planets existed at all, WISE would have found them. According to its wikipedia page, WISE could have detected a Jupiter-sized planet up to a light-year from the Sun. The 134 NEOs it did detect were assuredly not candidates for bashing Hoagland's Fig. 2.7 into line. They were all classified as asteroids or comets; Pluto-sized or smaller. So we're left with what he called "the obvious answer"—the hyperdimensional model is simply wrong.

        Take this together with the fact that none of the things Hoagland says are at 19.5° latitude actually are at that latitude, and it sure looks like thumbs down for HD physics.

        OH NO!!! First the so-called Ritual Alignment Model is falsified, and now this. Where next for Hoagland & Bara?