Posted on 02/18/2015 1:11:46 PM PST by BenLurkin
Highlighted by astronomers at the University of Rochester and the European Southern Observatory, the star — nicknamed “Scholz’s star” — has a very low tangential velocity in the sky, but it has been clocked traveling at a breakneck speed away from us.
In other words, from our perspective, Scholz’s star is fleeing the scene of a collision with us.
“Most stars this nearby show much larger tangential motion,” said Eric Mamajek, of the University of Rochester. “The small tangential motion and proximity initially indicated that the star was most likely either moving towards a future close encounter with the solar system, or it had ‘recently’ come close to the solar system and was moving away. Sure enough, the radial velocity measurements were consistent with it running away from the Sun’s vicinity — and we realized it must have had a close flyby in the past.”
...
Using data from the Southern African Large Telescope (SALT) and the Magellan telescope at Las Campanas Observatory in Chile, Mamajek and his collaborators were able to measure the star’s spectra and radial velocity. Through these observations they were able to deduce that Scholz’s star is a dim red dwarf approximately 20 light-years away. It is actually part of a binary system, with its partner being a small brown dwarf (or a ‘failed star’).
Taking these data, the researchers were able to model several different orbital possibilities and deduce that the star almost definitely (to a 98 percent certainty) came within 0.8 light years from the sun. Although this is still quite a margin, the star would have careened though the Oort Cloud — a hypothetical region filled with frozen cometary nuclei surrounding the solar system.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.discovery.com ...
Of possible interest ping.
70,000 years isn’t that long and could have shaken things loose in the Oort cloud that could still be headed our way.
Could this be the origins of the “Nemesis Mythos”?
I am sure the author intended a racist and possibly anti-small people insinuation there...............
What you talkin’ about?
70,000 years??? Whew...that was close!
A mere blink of the eye cosmologically speaking.
It might be prudent to look in the opposite direction for a similar but blue-shifted object.
70,000 years ago, a huge super volcano blew its stuff all over the world. It was called the Lake Toba (Sumatra) catastrophe.
The human population was reduced from about a million to about 10,000 or so souls that prepped well enough to survive.
I have always wanted to know what set it off...now I know.
Probably a coincidence, I think.
But an interesting one!
Nope. Sorry. The Creation was not that far in the past. So, NOTHING could have happened 70,000 years ago! Science proves it!
I know... can you imagine what that must have looked like?
Am I reading tis article correctly? This thing blew through our solar system 70K years ago?
I hope someone followed that star and got its license plate number! Of course, if it's a cute star, you might want to ask it out on a date.
NOT my fault.
Wonder what the sun traded for Pluto.
If that thing was that close I could imagine it easily disrupting planetary orbits and sending any civilization that existed 70K years ago under water
Not much to be honest - it's a very faint star. Even at that type of close approach, it wouldn't have been visible to the naked eye.
Am I reading tis article correctly? This thing blew through our solar system 70K years ago?
By some definitions, the outer solar system, yes - but not really the solar system as we commonly think of it. We'd still be looking at this star being somewhere around 1000 times as far from the sun as Pluto.
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