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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. ... Now two astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid, 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...

A group of astronomers from the US, Europe, Chile and South Africa have determined that 70,000 years ago a recently discovered dim star is likely to have passed through the solar system's distant cloud of comets, the Oort Cloud. No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this close - five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima Centauri. In a paper published in Astrophysical Journal Letters, lead author Eric Mamajek from the University of Rochester and his collaborators analyzed the velocity and trajectory of a low-mass star system nicknamed "Scholz's star." The star's trajectory...

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...

New research shows the most significant weakening is happening under Africa which has been dubbed the 'South Atlantic Anomaly' (SAA). As well as giving us our north and south poles, the magnetic field blankets the Earth, protecting it from solar winds and cosmic radiation. The forcefield has weakened significantly over the past 160 years and scientists now suggest it could be in the process of flipping. Such a change would be a switch in magnetic polarity and would see compasses point south rather than north. Scientists believe such an occurrence has actually happened several times in the history of our...

Since 2010, the best estimate of the age of Earth's magnetic field has been 3.45 billion years. But now a researcher responsible for that finding has new data showing the magnetic field is far older. John Tarduno, a geophysicist at the University of Rochester and a leading expert on Earth's magnetic field, and his team of researchers say they believe the Earth's magnetic field is at least four billion years old.

How long have the scientists known about the predicted pole-shift, expected date and likely causes, outcomes?

Young Earth was cocooned in a protective shield that magnetically deflected killer solar radiation 200 million years earlier than previously thought, a key factor that allowed life to take hold, according to a new study published this week in the journal Science. The research, based on analysis of ancient silicate crystals from South Africa, has implications for the search for life beyond Earth, which to date has focused on finding planets where liquid water can exist. The study by University of Rochester geophysicist John Tarduno and colleagues suggests that the ability of a planet to generate a large magnetic field...

SAN FRANCISCO - The strength of the Earth's magnetic field has decreased 10 percent over the past 150 years, raising the remote possibility that it may collapse and later reverse, flipping the planet's poles for the first time in nearly a million years, scientists said Thursday.   At that rate of decline, the field could vanish altogether in 1,500 to 2,000 years, said Jeremy Bloxham of Harvard University. Hundreds of years could pass before a flip-flopped field returned to where it was 780,000 years ago. But scientists at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union cautioned that scenario is an...

Textbook Case of Tectonic Movement is Wrong, Says New Study Results from an expedition to the sea floor near the Hawaiian Islands show evidence that the deep Earth is more unsettled than geologists have long believed. A new University of Rochester study suggests that the long chain of islands and seamounts, which is deemed a "textbook" example of tectonic plate motion, was formed in part by a moving plume of magma, upsetting the prevailing theory that plumes have been unmoving fixtures in Earth's history. The research will be published in the August 22 issue of Science. "Mobile magma plumes force...

Video of an arrest made at the University of Rochester over the weekend has been shared hundreds of times on social media and is now sparking questions about how University Police handled the situation. The incident happened on the River campus Saturday night. News10NBC is told the man who was handcuffed was a student at the University but he’s not taking summer classes. The night before, he was using a computer lab and was told by University Police to leave. The night of the incident, according to people who were there, the man was on the quad outside with friends...