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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Re:That is close! by ShanghaiBill · 2015-02-17 08:45 · Score: 4, 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 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, an Indonesian volcano, but that may not have been the only cause.