Another Star Passed Through Our Oort Cloud 70,000 Years Ago 117
New submitter mrthoughtful writes: According to researchers at the University of Rochester, a recently discovered dim star (Scholz's star) passed through our Oort cloud 70,000 years ago. At its closest, it was about 52,000 AU distant from Sol, or about 0.8 light-years. This is still quite a distance — Voyager 1 is about 125 AU away right now — but it's far closer than Proxima Centauri's current 266,000 AU. Still, maybe the best way to engage in interstellar travel is just to wait until the time is right.
That is close! (Score:5, Insightful)
In galactic distance, this was close and not very long ago.
I wonder how many comets it kicked out of the cloud and have cause some ruckus here on Terra.
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+1 to soulskill for including some reference points and orders of magnitude in the summary. now we just need posts from CC advocates/skeptics on how this impacts their arguments.
Re: That is close! (Score:1)
That's right about the time that the human race barely avoided extinction. Perhaps not a coincidence?
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2012/10/22/163397584/how-human-beings-almost-vanished-from-earth-in-70-000-b-c
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Coincidence. The paper [arxiv.org] suggests that even if it did perturb the Oort Cloud (which it probably didn't, at least, not the inner Oort Cloud), any rain of infalling comets that it kicked off will take about 2M years to get here.
Which made me think of this bit from the end of the Hitchhiker's Guide:
"Well I have got news, I have got news for you. It doesn't matter a pair foetid dingo's kidneys what you all cho
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Or at least figure out how to profit from on influx of material
Bill it as the next big gold rush and somebody is bound to put some effort into it, kinda like finding gold in the asteroid belt
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Only if I can have another ginnantonix. I'll get you one as well.
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Well, realms of arxiv paper today, it will permeate through to tabloid editors tomorrow... ok, in 2 to 3 years.
I predict the Daily Mail headline will be "Armageddon Threat From Immigrant Star".
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You know, I did not think much about it at the time, but this is the exact argument that Christans make. Revelation is nigh! No need to worry about global warming, pollution, and famine.. .we will all be raptured soon!
Was DNA making that joke, or am I reading too much into it?
I can't recall the study, but it showed that a significant number of Christians thought they were living in the end times for the past 2000 years.
Re:That is close! (Score:5, Interesting)
I wonder how many comets it kicked out of the cloud and have cause some ruckus here on Terra.
There was a human population collapse [wikipedia.org] right around that time. The population may have fallen to less than 10,000, and we nearly went extinct. This has been blamed on the eruption of Toba [wikipedia.org], an Indonesian volcano, but that may not have been the only cause.
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If its related, then given the speed of the object we dodged a bullet in more ways than one..
Since it was here 70 000 years ago and now is 20 light years away that means the star is traveling at 186 454 kilometers per second.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S... [wikipedia.org]
Ordinary stars in the galaxy have velocities on the order of 100 km/s, while hypervelocity stars (especially those near the center of the galaxy, which is where most are thought to be produced), have velocities on the order of 1000 km/s.
It is believed that about 1000 HVSs exist in our galaxy. Considering that there are around 100 billion stars in the Milky Way, this is a minuscule fraction (~0.000001%).
I think you may have a math error (or I could have (Score:5, Informative)
20 light years = 2* 10^14 kilometers
70,000 years = 2.1 * 10^12 seconds
Therefore two stars are moving apart from year other at ~100 km/second which is right in the range of what would have been expected.
Re:I think you may have a math error (or I could h (Score:4, Funny)
Good thing I am not allowed to pilot a starship.
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I think either your math's a bit off...
20 light years / 70000 years travel time = 1 / 3500. That means it's traveling at about 86 km/s relative to the sun. Nowhere near 186454 km/s, even adding the sun's velocity around the galactic center. Unless you meant 'meters per second'.
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I wonder how many comets it kicked out of the cloud and have cause some ruckus here on Terra.
There was a human population collapse [wikipedia.org] right around that time. The population may have fallen to less than 10,000, and we nearly went extinct. This has been blamed on the eruption of Toba [wikipedia.org], an Indonesian volcano, but that may not have been the only cause.
FTA:
Currently, Scholz's star is a small, dim red dwarf in the constellation of Monoceros, about 20 light years away. However, at the closest point in its flyby of the solar system, Scholz's star would have been a 10th magnitude star - about 50 times fainter than can normally be seen with the naked eye at night.
Unless it's gravitational effect was way larger I'm not sure it would be large and close enough to have an affect.
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I doubt that the star is a magnetar, but it's "magnetically active" per the article - if it were active enough it may have had some influence on our magnetically active core and/or magnetically-sensitive ionosphere. Earthquakes followed by volcanos or more likely additional radiation due to perturbations of the ionosphere.
Re:That is close! (Score:5, Informative)
According to Wikipedia, it would take 2 million years for any comets perturbed by this encounter to get to the inner solar system.
Scholz's Star [wikipedia.org]
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What a load of horseshit. That would mean the maximum velocity imparted towards the sun would be 250 miles per hour.
Re: That is close! (Score:1)
Yeah, this sun whistles by at 100km/s, enough to get 20+ light years away in 70k years, but can't impart any of that energy via its gravity. I ain't buying it.
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That's "could have", you illiterate moron.
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Why do you think any comets etc that were perturbed have already arrived?
There's nothing to prevent (say) a 10km body from having been perturbed 70,000 years ago, into an orbit that brings it into close proximity to Quaor in 10 years time, which then perturbs it into the inner Solar System on a couple of hundred year drop into a field in Oklahoma.
The debris could still be arriving here in several million years.
I can wait (Score:2)
Nemesis! (Score:2)
The timing of technology. (Score:3)
"Still, maybe the best way to engage in interstellar travel is just to wait until the time is right."
Er, we should wait?
Yeah, maybe you're right. I mean I've been wondering if now is a good time to pull the old warp drive out of my garage, with all the pressure on us to use electric cars and all...maybe I'll just hold off for a few more years and use my teleporter instead.
Just wish it didn't give me such bad gas. Bad timing I guess.
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http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]épisodes_de_Il_était_une_fois..._l'Espace#Le_long_voyage
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It's a joke, you see. If we wait, eventually a star will come close enough that we can just hop on over to it. Thus interstellar travel with no extra technology needed, apart from that which would keep us alive if another star were that close.
Love it. You simply throw a rope around the passing star, and it yanks you right off the planet. For the less-than-alert reader, if you can accelerate to the speed of a passing body... you don't really need that body.
Re:The timing of technology. (Score:5, Insightful)
"we are on track to exhaust our resources and die off on a withered old planet in the next 1,000 years or less"
The sun gives us an insane amount of nonstop energy. Do you not believe we will figure out how to effectively harness that in 1000 years time?
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It doesn't matter if we figure out how to harness that energy. Our planet will be so inhospitable that we won't survive as a civilization on it. We couldn't even get Biosphere 2 to work, so artificial habitats are out. And a few people living in some caves with solar panels on top does not equal a civilization, only a dying species.
I'm not saying it's impossible for humans to survive all this, but our track record and current direction are so bad that it's much more likely that things are going to collap
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Harnessing the energy won't be the problem. Dissipating the heat will be. At present grow rates we'll boil off the water in about 440 years. In a thousand years the energy we use will make the surface of the earth as hot as the surface of the sun. You can't fool mother nature.
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It wasn't exactly directed at you. And please, notice the qualifier I threw in there.
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they'll probably start trying to harness the sun in about 800 years time.
The obvious counter is that agriculture is primarily solar powered and even if we ignore that, we still have a large amount of solar power generation out there. It's happening now, not 800 years from now.
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we know how to effectively harness it NOW.
but we refuse to do so.
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Nonsense!
That body provides a lot of mass and energy, which could seriously improve the survivability of a slowboat full of colonists.
While I'd be willing to travel to another star using Ceres as a spacecraft, I'd much rather have Ceres plus a small star plus the mass of the cometary halo and asteroid belts of the small star....
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For the less-than-alert reader, if you can accelerate to the speed of a passing body... you don't really need that body.
Why would that be? If we can get a small ship that travels at 50% the speed of light, we could reach a star like this in around 2 years.
Once we reached it, if it was lucky enough to have a habitable planet then we're golden but even if it had a marslike planet, it still
would be considerably easier to colonize a mars size planet around another star system that it would be to build a generational ship
to get to the next closest star. Making a self contained environment for 2 years is alot easier than making
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Ignoring relativistic effects & GR in general (pardon the puny pun), it would take a ship almost 6 months & less than 1/10th of a light year to reach 0.5c, assuming a constant 1g acceleration. So, the only question is, what propulsion method are we going to have in the conceivable future that can sustain that kind of thrust with X number of humans and a total weight of Y (inc fuel/propellant)..? For ref, Saturn V weighs 3000 tons & can only produce thrust for 17 mins with all 3 stages at about 3
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Except, with a star towing you, it might be possible to use the star for an energy source to keep the O2 flowing and stuff like that... In the vast nothingness of space, there isn't much to scavenge, energy wise..
Still, I'm not sure being that close to a fusion reactor is worth the radiation exposure....
Re: The timing of technology. (Score:1)
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70000 years is just too much time in a civilization time frame. Just 10000 years ago human civilization started. And we already reached the stage of being able to create weapons (and actually used them) that could end mankind any single decade, and didn't showed any maturity regarding their use (there was several situations past century where was mostly luck what avoided their use in a massive scale).
Odds that we won't be around in 100 years are not low, and they only will keep increasing with time. We wi
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Odds that we won't be around in 100 years are not low, and they only will keep increasing with time.
You worded that confusingly. Did you mean to say, "the risk we won't not be extinct is not diminishing?"
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So, you mean to say that the negative reciprocal of the risk of nonextinction is rapidly diminishing?
I'll wait (Score:2)
Until Virgin Galactic starts selling tickets, I'll wait to travel interstellar coach class. I still bet they'll take away leg space and the seats will be as hard as church pews.
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....I'll wait to travel interstellar coach class....
I guess you'll lots of time to learn all the Irish folk dances.
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....I'll wait to travel interstellar coach class....
I guess you'll lots of time to learn all the Irish folk dances.
As long as Zapp Branigan isn't the captain, I'll opt for tickets in Steerage.
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Until Virgin Galactic starts selling tickets,
I thought they already had started selling tickets....
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Not for interstellar.. Those are for quick hops to 100km.
it passed through our Oort cloud ? (Score:1)
We need to stop that. Lets extend the authority off the TSA to 1 light year from the border.
Come on. It is a little over the top. (Score:2)
I'm not saying it was Aliens (Score:2)
I'm saying it was Aliens (Score:2)
I posit to you two things.
1) Red dwarf stars may harbour hospitable planets, close to the star where it is warm. We are looking for life on Jupiter's moons, driven not by light but heat from Jupiter's tidal wave forces, so it is conceivable that life can eventually evolve
could this be related to the genetic-bottleneck? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wait till the time is right? (Score:5, Insightful)
Sure. If we want to wait tens, hundreds, thousands or millions of centuries before something comes close enough. And then we have to hope that it's something useful and habitable.
And, in the mean time, we could conveniently die out.
How about "no".
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It's sort of like saying the best way to reach the Americas would have been to wait for continental drift to reconnect the land masses.
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Not quite... the summary is implying that interstellar travel may take significantly more time than the actual wait, so waiting for something to get closer may make sense. Assuming you just want to get to A star, not to a specific one.
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Conveniently dying out is the best thing humans can do for the sake of the rest of life on this planet.
VHEMT!
You first!
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Conveniently dying out is the best thing humans can do for the sake of the rest of life on this planet.
How is the rest of life going to get off the planet when the Sun turns into a red giant. And I can't help but notice that conveniently dying out is not the best thing humanity can do for itself.
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Sure. If we want to wait tens, hundreds, thousands or millions of centuries before something comes close enough. And then we have to hope that it's something useful and habitable.
And the last part is pretty huge too. Unless we're seriously going to up our game on planetary terraforming we have some pretty specific requirements for gravity, temperature and magnetic field so the atmosphere and surface water isn't stripped away by the local star and bombarded with radiation if we want another "normal" earth where we can eventually walk around outside. Composition of atmosphere too, though CO2 concentration is not that much of a problem as we have algae that'll grow in 100% CO2 and conv
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Unless we're seriously going to up our game on planetary terraforming we have some pretty specific requirements for gravity, temperature and magnetic field so the atmosphere and surface water isn't stripped away by the local star and bombarded with radiation if we want another "normal" earth where we can eventually walk around outside.
Or human adaptation. Any serious interstellar travel will probably involve humans who live much longer than current ones anyway.
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Not interstella, but the Voyagers were able to do what they did because "the planets aligned" to allow for lots of slingshots. You could argue mankind waited a few millennia for that specific situation before launching those probes...
Repeating the exercise either takes some supremely advanced technology, lots of additional effort, lots of time, or possibly waiting the however-many-years until it happens again.
Reciprocity: we also went through it's Ooort cloud (Score:2)
There could be an active scene of comet swapping going on with these wandering stars.
Who is to say Halley's comet is one of ours?
H.G. Wells called it (The Star) (Score:3)
Although his might have come a little closer. As an aside, you won't see gender-sensitive writing like this anymore, except as comedy:
And voice after voice repeated, "It is nearer," and the clicking telegraph took that up, and it trembled along telephone wires, and in a thousand cities grimy compositors fingered the type. "It is nearer." Men writing in offices, struck with a strange realisation, flung down their pens, men talking in a thousand places suddenly came upon a grotesque possibility in those words, "It is nearer." It hurried along wakening streets, it was shouted down the frost-stilled ways of quiet villages; men who had read these things from the throbbing tape stood in yellow-lit doorways shouting the news to the passersby. "It is nearer." Pretty women, flushed and glittering, heard the news told jestingly between the dances, and feigned an intelligent interest they did not feel. "Nearer! Indeed. How curious! How very, very clever people must be to find out things like that!"
http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook... [gutenberg.org]
Conversion (Score:2)
For those that wonder, Voyager at 125 AU is about .002 light year distant. The star was 400 times further out. Likewise, if we to launch our currently fastest spacecraft New Horizons (that is reaching Pluto soon in July 2015 at 33.77 AU) towards the star (when it was closest), it would take about 14,000 years to reach that star. There have been a number of nuclear rockets proposed, with the latest version from NASA in 2011 (the Magneto-Inertial Fusion planned for Mars missions). If that rocket reached its
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Actually if Scholz's star had a planetary system, that would not make any meaningful difference for the larger numbers especially considering the low accuracy. E.g. using your thought, it might take 109 years instead of 110 to reach a planet orbiting Scholz's star using a nuclear engine. So the distance would not necessarily be a lot smaller. It does have a brown dwarf companion, but again it would not make much difference time wise. Being discovered in 2013, it is not known if it has any planets orbiting
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The distances are indeed immense and we have much bigger worries.
Guys, we haven't had a human leave Earth properly in nearly 50 years. Given how little tech like this was possible 50 years before we did do that, that's damn atrocious. And that didn't come with bothering to use AU for the distance at all.
Even Voyager is 40 years old, and we've barely sent a damn thing to follow them.
Get to the Moon, and then we can worry about Mars.
Get to Mars, and then we can worry about other planets.
Get to other planets
sure, let's do that (Score:3)
Yes, let's hop on board a star. That's safe and makes sense. Even orbiting it, to catch up to the star, you have to be going the same speed as it and in the same direction, in which case you might as well just keep going in whatever craft you're in and ignore the star. Hurray for physics and math.
So that's where we come from! (Score:2)
I can see the Däniken [wikipedia.org] theorists [daniken.com] jumping on to this one.
Star? I guess... (Score:2)
Waiting is pointless. (Score:2)
Unfortunately, our current capability is probably closer to 0.000008 ly than to 0.8 ly.
Online File Backup (Score:1)
You think YOU are fast? (Score:3, Interesting)
Wikipedia says that star is 17-23 light years away. If it passed nearby only 70000 years ago, then that means it must be moving at nearly at about 1/3000 to 1/4000 the speed of light. So, like, about ten times faster than the Space Shuttle or five times faster than V'ger.
Forget ion drives; let's build star-hooks.
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You AC penis-lovers should get a room. Full of dildos. Have fun! ;)