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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: 1) by khallow on Sunday March 25 2018, @08:35AM
It's not logical. And the approach has its place particularly with complex systems that one doesn't understand well enough to come up with even a basic model (which describes a lot of modern medicine unfortunately). But once you've come up with models and such, you have better approaches.
The problem as I think we all know is not that we're haplessly implementing a flawed approach here, but rather that publicly funded medical research (and a lot of other research) is about theater rather than scientific progress. P-hacking just happens to be an easy way to attract that sort of funding.
My point however, is that not all funding is of this sort. A lot of people actually want solutions to big problems in medicine and are willing to pay for them. Theater isn't good enough. That's the research that I think will be decisive in the coming century.