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

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday February 17, 2015 @08:05AM 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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I think you may have a math error (or I could have by MaizeMan · 2015-02-17 09:16 · Score: 4, Informative

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.
Re:That is close! by mcl630 · 2015-02-17 10:54 · Score: 4, 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