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Another Star Passed Through Our Oort Cloud 70,000 Years Ago
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.
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.
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 preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"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.
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.
Harrison's Postulate - "For every action there is an equal and opposite criticism"
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.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
But it was Aliens form Nibiru.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R'lyeh
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulw...
From TFA: "The radial velocity measurements taken by Ivanov and collaborators, however, showed the star moving almost directly away from the solar system at considerable speed. "
Goddamn hit-and-run drivers...
funny, there was a MASSIVE earth heat event and die off that almost wiped out mankind about that time...
http://mbe.oxfordjournals.org/content/17/1/2.short
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".
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
Here are my numbers:
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.
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?
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...
http://pcblues.com - Digits and Wood
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 technological goals (by 2030), it would take roughly 110 years to reach Scholz when it was at its closest. These numbers are merely back of the envelope two digit accuracy, and are not meant to be precise but give ballpark figures.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
This made me giggle, thank you :-D
I guess I should have noticed something was off when my result suggested it was moving at over 60% the speed of light...
Good thing I am not allowed to pilot a starship.
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.
"Believe me!" -- Donald Trump
No, from another post, "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."
"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.
Yes. You might try to do the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.
You AC penis-lovers should get a room. Full of dildos. Have fun! ;)
I can see the Däniken theorists 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.
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 on such planets.
2) In the theory of panspermia, it is possible that our planet was seeded by outside worlds, you have probably heard of mars meteorites being investigated for bringing potential lifeforms here for example. But this theory works in reverse as well, it is thought that Earth itself may be seeding the galaxy with life as by chance bacteria get blasted off the biosphere and carried away on solar winds.
3) After 6 billion years, or at some 60,000 encounters with our Oort cloud, is it totally inconceivable that there might be either some kind of transfer that has taken hold between the worlds of Sol and Scholz? Or that life, arising independently there, wouldn't be interested in coming here as their only opportunity to travel between the stars?
Why was this modded down? This is actually a very insightful comment. This thread is a perfect example of how the moderation system is abused in an attempt to hide the opinions that the moderators don't want others to read.
If you have to rely on the moderation system to determine what you should and shouldn't read, then you're a fucking tool.
No, it is a fucking tool. To be used, or not used, as one wishes. For the most part, anything modded to -1 is not worth my time.
No-one has to rely on it if they don't want to.
Learn to think for yourself.
I already do, thanks. Slashdot comments are not so important to me that I feel I have to read every single one in case there's a gem of information buried in a post that's been modded down to -1. Those are my thoughts on moderation.
Let's put an end to the over-abused moderation system.
Just don't use it.
Unfortunately, our current capability is probably closer to 0.000008 ly than to 0.8 ly.
Is that how it works? Is that proper use of the moderation system? Mod it down so you can try to hide it?
Do you also try to hide posts that express socio-political views that differ from yours? Wouldn't you prefer people formulate their own opinions based on reading the full conversation, rather than just the half that you want them to see?
Slashdot, please do away with this horrible moderation system already.
Oh, can we borrow your room and your dildos? There's enough for everyone!
No-one has to rely on it if they don't want to.
Obviously, you missed my whole point. That being, if you do rely on the moderation system, then you're a fucking tool.
Slashdot comments are not so important to me that I feel I have to read every single one in case there's a gem of information buried in a post that's been modded down to -1.
It works both ways. You do realize that just as many comments were modded up +5 by all the agenda pushing sheep, don't you? I'll call you a liar if you try to tell me that you don't read every single one of them.
Well, thanks to moderation very few people will have seen his post. Except, whoops, you went and replied to it. And then some idiot modded you up, so now more people will see your post and wonder what you were replying to.
Posting AC for obvious reasons. Mod me and parent down.
I would say that your warning of a Streisand effect was more cause for it than the post you are replying to.
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