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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.
"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.
But it was Aliens form Nibiru.
http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulw...
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.
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
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
"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.
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.