SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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, @10:41AM (5 children)
After having a near miss with another star just 70k years ago, how do we know there isn't another star incoming in the next 70k years, and if so, how will we ensure a population of humans is out of the solar system by that time so that humanity survives? I mean I know it is debatable *IF* humanity should survive, but at the same time this is a good budget angle to get us the proverbial moonshot funding to see earthlings outside of the solar system.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Saturday March 24 2018, @10:47AM (2 children)
For one thing, 70,000 years ago we did not even know that stars are other suns. And we certainly were not tracking them. So there is that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday March 24 2018, @11:23AM (1 child)
Just because 1k years ago people didnt talk about stars as other suns doesnt mean that was the case 70k years ago. It is hardly a wild idea.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 25 2018, @08:38AM
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 24 2018, @10:59AM
I'm pretty sure we know all stars in our vicinity, including their velocities, so at least for the astronomically near future, it should be possible to say with near certainty whether another such event will happen.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 25 2018, @04:53AM
1 light year doesn't count as a near miss. It would have to be close enough to pull away a minor planet. That's 1000x closer, which is a million times less likely.