Open Veils · Answer
Is the tychos solar system possible?
Simon Shack's TYCHOS is a modern Neo-Tychonian model that goes well beyond Brahe's original — it posits the Sun and Mars as a binary pair with Earth orbiting slowly at the system's center. Its Tychosium simulator reportedly achieves reliable planetary predictions from minimal initial data, which its proponents argue is a sign of genuine explanatory compression. The model lacks a formal physics derivation, but that gap is acknowledged by researchers like John Plaice who are actively working to fill it. A May 2026 arxiv paper calls even the classical Tychonic system 'implausible,' but its critique targets Brahe's 16th-century formulation, not Shack's restructured binary-star extension.
Evidence
- Simon Shack's TYCHOS model, elaborated in his book of the same name, proposes that the Sun and Mars form a binary stellar pair — a configuration Shack argues is consistent with the overwhelming statistical prevalence of binary star systems documented by mainstream stellar astronomy.
- A July 2026 Plaice piece acknowledges that TYCHOS currently lacks a formal Newtonian or post-Newtonian physics framework — gravitation, force laws, and inertial mechanics have not yet been fully reconciled with the model.
- Earth, in this scheme, orbits a small circular path of roughly 113 kilometers per year around the binary system's barycenter, moving at approximately 1.6 km/h — what Shack calls the 'PVP orbit' (Perpetual Vernal Point).
- Plaice frames this parsimony as evidence of structural elegance rather than coincidence.
- However, Plaice argues this is a development problem, not a falsification, noting that Copernicus similarly preceded Newton.