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Scholz's star, a binary system consisting of a red dwarf and a brown dwarf, changed the trajectory of comets and other distant solar system objects when it passed just 0.82 light years from the Sun around 70,000 years ago:
At a time when modern humans were beginning to leave Africa and the Neanderthals were living on our planet, Scholz's star - named after the German astronomer who discovered it - approached less than a light-year from the Sun. Nowadays it is almost 20 light-years away, but 70,000 years ago it entered the Oort cloud, a reservoir of trans-Neptunian objects located at the confines of the solar system.
This discovery was made public in 2015 by a team of astronomers led by Professor Eric Mamajek of the University of Rochester (USA). The details of that stellar flyby, the closest documented so far, were presented in The Astrophysical Journal Letters [open, DOI: 10.1088/2041-8205/800/1/L17] [DX].
Now two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid (Spain), the brothers Carlos and Raúl de la Fuente Marcos, together with the researcher Sverre J. Aarseth of the University of Cambridge (United Kingdom), have analyzed for the first time the nearly 340 objects of the solar system with hyperbolic orbits (very open V-shaped, not the typical elliptical), and in doing so they have detected that the trajectory of some of them is influenced by the passage of Scholz´s star.
"Using numerical simulations we have calculated the radiants or positions in the sky from which all these hyperbolic objects seem to come," explains Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, who together with the other coauthors publishes the results in the MNRAS Letters [open, DOI: 10.1093/mnrasl/sly019] [DX] journal.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24 2018, @09:58AM (1 child)
... when is the next star passing on a close enough proximity for something like that to have an influence on our star system?
(Score: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday March 24 2018, @10:19AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars_and_brown_dwarfs#Future_and_past [wikipedia.org]
Given the size estimates of the Oort cloud [wikipedia.org] (up to 3.2 light years), there should already be some influence from the closest star(s). Alpha Centauri could capture or at least influence a comet orbiting up to 3 light years away from the Sun. But the effects will be more dramatic, although not necessarily devastating, as stars come as close as 0.1 light years (~6,000 AU).
There is a lot of uncertainty on that list as it is not always easy to determine the distance and movement of stars. But HIP 85605 [wikipedia.org] could come as close as 0.13 ly in 240,000 years. More near term encounters are Barnard's Star approaching as close as 3.74 ly in 9,800 years (about ~5.98 ly today), or Proxima Centauri at 2.9 ly in 27,400 years (~4.25 ly today).
Gliese 710 could approach to 0.14 ly in over 1.3 million years.
The list should be refined over time. There are nearby brown dwarfs that were discovered less than 5 years ago. There could be even harder to detect rogue planets whizzing around that are under 13 Jupiter masses. These would have less influence than a red dwarf or larger star, but it also depends on how close they get.
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