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

Posted by Soulskill on 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.

6 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. That is close! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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. Re:That is close! by ShanghaiBill · · 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.

    2. Re:That is close! by mcl630 · · 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

  2. Wait till the time is right? by Chas · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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!!!
  3. I think you may have a math error (or I could have by MaizeMan · · 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.

  4. Re:The timing of technology. by MooseTick · · Score: 4, Insightful

    "we are on track to exhaust our resources and die off on a withered old planet in the next 1,000 years or less"

    The sun gives us an insane amount of nonstop energy. Do you not believe we will figure out how to effectively harness that in 1000 years time?

    --
    Ninjas don't carry tic tacs