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Another Star Passed Through Our Oort Cloud 70,000 Years Ago 117

Posted by Soulskill from the thanks-for-not-hitting-us dept.
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.
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Another Star Passed Through Our Oort Cloud 70,000 Years Ago More

Another Star Passed Through Our Oort Cloud 70,000 Years Ago

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  • That is close! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @04:08PM (#49075025)

    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.

    • +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)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That's right about the time that the human race barely avoided extinction. Perhaps not a coincidence?

        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

        • 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

        • Only if I can have another ginnantonix. I'll get you one as well.

        • 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".

        • 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)

      by ShanghaiBill ( 739463 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @04:45PM (#49075427)

      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.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by NettiWelho ( 1147351 )

        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 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.

        • 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)

        by mcl630 ( 1839996 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @06:54PM (#49076533)

        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]

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by Boronx ( 228853 )

          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)

          by Anonymous Coward

          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.

    • If the start had its own ort cloud then intersteller comet/asteroids/dwarf planets could of passed near Earth.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        That's "could have", you illiterate moron.

    • I wonder how many comets it kicked out of the cloud and have cause some ruckus here on Terra.

      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.

  • Another couple hundred thousand years is nothing... At least our sun should still be around at that time but it is a crap shoot if a good start flies past.
  • Hey! Watch where you're going! You almost hit us!

  • The timing of technology. (Score:3)

    by geekmux ( 1040042 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @04:14PM (#49075083)

    "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.

    • Well there are a few stories out there about the first interstellar ship finally arriving after a few hundred years to find a fully terraformed and colonized planet as our technology made major breakthroughs back home while they were in space.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gmuslera ( 3436 )

      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

      • 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?"

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by gmuslera ( 3436 )
          The risk that we will be extinct will be increasing with time, for both new discoveries/technologies and another year when they may be applied. Is like throwing dices till a 6 comes, eventually it will happen.

          • So, you mean to say that the negative reciprocal of the risk of nonextinction is rapidly diminishing?

  • 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.

    • ....I'll wait to travel interstellar coach class....

      I guess you'll lots of time to learn all the Irish folk dances.

      • ....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.

    • Until Virgin Galactic starts selling tickets,

      I thought they already had started selling tickets....

  • it passed through our Oort cloud ? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    We need to stop that. Lets extend the authority off the TSA to 1 light year from the border.

  • Yes, Rajnikant is balding and getting on the years. But still he is not that old. I would say he is 120 years, tops.
  • But it was Aliens form Nibiru.
    • Red Dwarf stars are long lived stars, they can continue to exist for trillions of years, though this one is expected to be 6-10 billion years old. It is also expected that it has close crossings with our solar system every 100,000 years.

      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

  • Wait till the time is right? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Chas ( 5144 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @04:44PM (#49075413) Homepage Journal

    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".

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Anonymous Coward

      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.

      • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Kjella ( 173770 )

      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

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by khallow ( 566160 )

        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.

    • 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.

  • 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)

    by marko123 ( 131635 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @05:38PM (#49075883) Homepage

    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]

  • 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

    • Did the star have its own planetary system? If so then distance could be a lot smaller.

      • 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

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by ledow ( 319597 )

      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)

    by slashmydots ( 2189826 ) on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @10:13PM (#49077747)
    "Still, maybe the best way to engage in interstellar travel is just to wait until the time is right."
    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.

  • I can see the Däniken [wikipedia.org] theorists [daniken.com] jumping on to this one.

  • In fairness, it was a D-list star. Not a great one. More like a glorified extra. Similar to that red headed woman on CNN on New Years Eve.
  • If, at some point, we have the capability to travel 0.8 ly (which probably includes keeping a spacecraft operational for decades), it's probably not very difficult to scale it up to 8.0 ly.

    Unfortunately, our current capability is probably closer to 0.000008 ly than to 0.8 ly.

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