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posted by martyb on Saturday March 24 2018, @08:25AM   Printer-friendly
from the twinkle-twinkle dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday March 24 2018, @11:38AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Saturday March 24 2018, @11:38AM (#657467) Journal

    Do you want another star1 to stick around? Do you want it to come closer to, say, 1 AU from the Sun?

    1. luminous spheroid of plasma with a mass exceeding approximately 80 Jupiter masses
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  • (Score: 2) by Gaaark on Saturday March 24 2018, @01:34PM

    by Gaaark (41) on Saturday March 24 2018, @01:34PM (#657501) Journal

    I LIKE FATTIES!! Fat bottom stars make the world go round. :)

    Snookie could clear my orbit anytime/moon me/set me on fire...
    Love a good helmet head....damn: just threw up into my mouth a bit with that joke. [hurls violently]

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