>>>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.
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?