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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: 2) by acid andy on Friday April 06 2018, @12:37PM (1 child)
Yeah. When I thought about this time dilation keeping a space traveler young, when I myself was younger, I had a crazy idea for how to deal with the problem of all your colleagues back home aging hundreds of years while you were away. It's wildly inconvenient but I imagined they could all either enter a device, or the whole surface of the planet (or their country) be modified to be a device, that somehow accelerated them in place to an equivalent speed.
The trouble is they would have to be either vibrated back and forth or constantly rotating so that they didn't move too far from their home. Which of course means that they would constantly have to be undergoing acceleration or deceleration and it couldn't be too violent. This would require enormous amounts of energy and of course would severely limit the average speed and amount of time dilation attained, so the craft would have to move slower to match, or they would have to settle for a compromise where the colleagues at home age faster but are still alive when the traveler returns.
The whole idea sounds so inconvenient, difficult and uncomfortable that it would probably be more sensible for the entire society to just travel together as one in an enormous biosphere almost like a traveling planet (but obviously far less massive).
Master of the science of the art of the science of art.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday April 06 2018, @01:08PM
We just have to accept some people breaking away from the rest of humanity, unless the black swans of faster-than-light travel or communications are realized.
If mind uploading becomes possible, you may have a way to send a lot more people on an interstellar voyage, or even "clone" personalities of loved ones to stave off loneliness.
The near term concern (within the next few centuries) is colonizing or mining every rock in the solar system. Bezos (world's richest man) thinks that the solar system could support 1 trillion people [soylentnews.org]. If you are staying indoors the whole time, then distant rocks like Pluto and Sedna could be almost as easy to colonize as Mars or Titan.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]