Cowbells and cats, that's what this thread needs.
Posted on 03/15/2010 8:14:32 PM PDT by Free ThinkerNY
A new set of star velocity data indicates that Gliese 710 has an 86 percent chance of ploughing into the Solar System within the next 1.5 million years.
The Solar System is surrounded by thousands of stars, but until recently it wasn't at all clear where they were all heading.
In 1997, however, astronomers published the Hipparcos Catalogue giving detailed position and velocity measurements of some 100,000 stars in our neighbourhood, all gathered by the European Space Agency's Hipparcos spacecraft. It's fair to say that the Hipparcos data has revolutionised our understanding of the 'hood.
In particular, this data allowed astronomers to work out which stars we'd been closer to in the past and which we will meet in the future. It turns out that 156 stars fall into this category and that the Sun has a close encounter with another star (meaning an approach within 1 parsec) every 2 million years or so.
In 2007, however, the Hipparcos data was revised and other measurements of star velocities have since become available. How do these numbers change the figures?
Today, Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St Petersburg gives us the answer. He's combined the Hipparcos data with several new databases and found an additional nine stars that have either had a close encounter with the Sun or are going to.
But he's also made a spectacular prediction. The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.
(Excerpt) Read more at technologyreview.com ...
Astronomy Ping!
Weapon of Choice- FatBoySlim
featuring the dancing of Christopher Walkin
The story is obviously over-hyped. The odds that within 1.5 million years a star could strike a planet 4.5 billion years old are over 3,000 to one. If the story was true, I’d have to seriously question how the earth could have survived such risks long enough for life to evolve.
Don’t worry, I’m going to get one of those twisty light-bulbs and buy some carbon credits! This should help stop this star!
Have had it saved on my hard drive for a long time.
The Walken Dude rules....:)
[go look up Walken singing “Delilah”....freaking hilarious]
Yeah, but that’s just not alarmist enough for me.
I like my “IMMINENT IMPENDING DOOM!!!” scenarios a bit more intense so I tend to jazz them up a bit....;-D
“smash into” is a bizarre choice of words”
Oh, but it’s so panic-stricken terrifyingly INTENSE!
[who needs scientific/statistical reality when you can conjure up perfectly good hyperbole?]...:)
Good time to read “War And Peace” or the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica, if you haven’t, already...:)
Still babbling about “Hister”, no doubt.
PING
Cowbells and cats, that's what this thread needs.
I presume that all the velocities are calculated using the assumption that redshift=velocity.
If Halton Arp is right, this scenario may be totally wrong.
1.5 million years from now. Wow, that has me worried. The way species have disappeared off the face of the earth over the last 4 billion years or so, I don’t think humans will be here to see this event.
NOW will we stop driving our SUV’s?!!!
o/~ Oompa-loompa doompa-dee-doo. I've got a cos-mic diasaster for you... o/~
Back in the ‘60s, I read the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica in the fall of my junior year in high school.
Then, that spring, I read the entire Great Books of the Western World.
The following year, (senior), I decided to read “War And Peace”. I’ve made it about 1/3 of the way through. I hope I finish by the time that Orange Dwarf Star gets here.
;>D
“Orange Dwarf Star Set to Smash into The Solar System”
Around these parts, folks don’t take any crap from dwarves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdWCH_R20GE
>>>Brought to you by the cousins of those that gave you ‘Global Warming.’
No, brought to you by the cousins of those that gave you lunar exploration, Mars rovers, and observations of the universe that show us the star fields of billions of years ago. Over the coming decades the sun’s flight path will be more closely studied and the math refined to confirm or disprove this hypothesis.
Malpractice in one field of science doesn’t invalidate any other scientific observations from unrelated fields. Orbital mechanics are pretty straight-forward. It would have been so nice to open a thread like this and not see such a meaningless, pointless and generally irrelevant global warming non-sequitor. Asking too much I suppose.
>>>The odds that within 1.5 million years a star could strike a planet 4.5 billion years old are over 3,000 to one.
With interstellar scales of distances what they are, I’d think the odds would be a lot higher then that. As I read the story, nothing is said about Earth being struck by the sun. Just that the preliminary math says the other sun will pass close enough to the solar system that Ort Cloud may be disrupted by the other sun’s gravity, which then may increase the risk of such cometary impacts.
And my parents think *I’m* the weirdest person they’ve ever known.
[LOL]
Ah... Lighten up. I was mostly kidding. Did it really require a 4-5 paragraphs response? I am not the anti-scientist. Much of my high school curriculum and my minor in college was physical science. Chemistry, Physics and Astronomy were all courses that I aced along with Algebra, Geometry and Calculus.
These predictions of ‘near-misses’ are based on computer models, dontcha know? A little healthy skepticism is in order. Scientists can’t predict earthquakes yet or our weather beyond about 10 days, how can they predict what’s going to happen in 1 million years and how do they really know what happened billions of years ago with the ‘big bang’ and all that?
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