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A Star Grazed Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago, Early Humans Likely Saw It (space.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Some distant objects in our solar system bear the gravitational imprint of a small star's close flyby 70,000 years ago, when modern humans were already walking the Earth, a new study suggests. In 2015, a team of researchers announced that a red dwarf called Scholzs star apparently grazed the solar system 70,000 years ago, coming closer than 1 light-year to the sun. For perspective, the suns nearest stellar neighbor these days, Proxima Centauri, lies about 4.2 light-years away. The astronomers came to this conclusion by measuring the motion and velocity of Scholzs star -- which zooms through space with a smaller companion, a brown dwarf or "failed star" -- and extrapolating backward in time. Scholz's star passed by the solar system at a time when early humans and Neanderthals shared the Earth. The star likely appeared as a faint reddish light to anyone looking up at the time, researchers with the new study said. The study has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters.
Some people are theorizing that the pair interfered with the orbits of comets in the Oort cloud, some of which might have come closer to, or even hit the Earth as a result.
As for "early humans saw it", down-scaled to "appeared as a faint reddish light to anyone looking up at the time".. "Hey, look up! The sky is slightly redder than it was last week! Wow, that hasn't happened since the last volcano."
One light year is still WAY beyond the bounds of our known solar system and lets nor forget that the oort cloud is still pretty theoretical and no one has actually seen one of these objects yet in situ (though the claim is this is where comets come from) unlike those in the kuiper belt. So saying it grazed out solar system is pushing it a bit. If it had strayed into the kuiper belt yes , otherwise, umm, not really.
1 light-year is 63,241 AU.
An AU is the distance from the Earth to the Sun.
The solar system is about 40AU (depending on your definition of planet).
So "close" is really... well, testing things a bit. Astronomically, yes, very close.
Practically? It's 20,000 times the size of the entire solar system away and to my knowledge only two objects have ever left the solar system.
Chronologically? It happened 70,000 years ago which, again, is tiny in astronomical terms but it's already long gone. We could do nothing about it in a reasonable time, we'd barely be able to study it, and if it was slightly to the left we'd all be interstellar dust (again) by now.
Though interesting, it's hardly close or anything we can really utilise or study,
I'd be more worried along the lines of "chances are something else could come and go this and wipe us out and likely we'd never know it was going to happen". Not just stray asteriods (which obviously would be knocked for six by something like this straying close) but an entire damn star. That's solar-system-ending.
Some beetles navigate by the Milky Way.
Ancient cultures all named thousands of stars and gave them associated legends, as well as navigated by them. They knew about comets, meteors, stars and galaxies.
To be honest, they were more likely to notice something unusual - especially if it moved over time - than the average person would be today. The naked eye doesn't pick up much in a city nowadays.
You know how I got into astronomy at age 30? I saw Venus for the very first time, while driving to Scotland for 9 hours.
A culture that revolves around day-time and can't do anything of an evening because of insufficient light, yet being a species that naturally wakes up throughout the night - they're going to spot a red star going across the sky just like they could spot Venus doing so. And it would be a "Oh, look, that's unusual" rather than "ARGH! We're all gonna die!" purely because it wouldn't actually be that unusual or interesting to them, given the size and brightness of said star in the sky.
... and check Sun's insurance coverage for interstellar collisions. Is a repair insurance included in its policy ? Does it allow full replacement of damaged planets, or is it just offering a mere fix of broken parts ? What about the insurance coverage offered to passengers traveling either on board of planets or space veichles ?
Magnitude ~11, that's really dim.
It means they're talking about Homo sapiens (same species as all the idiots wandering around on the planet today) who were around 70,000 years ago along side Homo neanderthalensis (who were not modern humans and are no longer around, unless you count some DNA left over from our ancestors fucking anything that held still long enough).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Whoever authored the science news did not check their facts. Scholz's Star had an estimated absolute magnitude of 11.4 at closest approach, which is nowhere near visible enough to be seen with the naked eye. Unless telescopes were in use 70,000 years ago, it's clear that nobody would have had any clue what was going on.
For perspective, the suns nearest stellar neighbor ...
It came so close that it dislodged nearly all of our apostrophes, leaving /. editors unable to use them for 70,000 years to come.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
As someone who identifies as a member of the neaderthal community, I still am discriminated against on a daily basis. This has been going on since human life began - somewhere in the middle East - and continues till this day. Daily occurrences of being pulled over for what is likely "driving while neanderthal" are all to common. When I suggest that is the reason for stopping me, they play dumb about my obvious neanderthal heritage. Will this ever end? When will you homo sapiens pay for the suffering of my peoples?
Scholz's star is currently 18.3 magnitude, and these flares are supposed to subtract 9 magnitudes.
This should be visible by the The All Sky Automated Survey which monitors everything brighter than 14 magnitude.
So we probably already have the data to answer the question of likelihood. It's surprising that the Scholz's star researchers aren't doing it.
Apparently it would have been a tenth magnitude object, undoubtedly visible in Neanderthal telescopes.
Recently an astrophysics professor announced the discovery of a fantastic new object he discovered on his long exposure images. He announced it to the world, but he had to send out a retraction when someone pointed out that it was the planet Mars. http://www.iflscience.com/spac...
While I consider that everything is at a safe distance
Just brace yourselves fellas. In just 200,000 years one of these comets will strike the earth and kill 99.9% of all known species. Projections are humans will be only species left at that time subsisting on eating each other. But why engage in idle speculation?
Since the Earth is going to be hit by a comet anyway in 200,000 years, why bother with conservation, environmentalism and organically grown tomatoes? Just enjoy life.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
You've changed the subject. This is a meta conversation about the reaction here when the words "Electric" and "Universe" are placed in proximity to one another. I am not discussing the science at this point -- just the collective reactions here.
If somebody was to ask you in the street -- without access to wikipedia or any other resources -- what the Electric Universe actually is, the nature of the problem would become immediately obvious. You would observably struggle to explain the idea's details.
The fact of the matter is that the most vocal critics here on Slashdot generally know the least about the idea. We need not perform such a survey, actually, because we can tell as much from the fact that none of the comments here exhibit the overt hostility to this nearly identical idea proposed by mainstream academics.
Re: "Except one is extrapolation from direct measurement and the other is, in your words, a 'short leap of imagination' which I think is being very generous about how long a leap it is."
"Eighty-four distinct high-energy-density Z-pinch categories have been identified in petroglyphs, nearly all of which belong to the archaic [50] class. Only a small percentage of these petroglyphs, or petroglyph patterns, do not fall into any of these categories."
I've created a graphic here which I think reduces the confusion of this paper. It lays out the surprising correspondence between laboratory-generated plasma instabilities in high-intensity electric discharges and common abstract petroglyph forms.
"40% of petroglyph types can be accounted for."
Re: "I think if you read up a bit more about Gerald Pollack you'll see that the folks who are co-opting his work are other crackpots extrapolating from his book and work to make bizarre claims about magic water which he never made."
You made this up. I am talking about mainstream researchers. There is nothing at all bizarre about structured water. It has been extensively studied in the laboratory. It can be observed to accumulate at the top of a typical cup of water as a reaction to casting a very specific frequency of infrared light onto it. The experiment is not complicated. Since the structured and bulk water are actually two different molecular arrangements, they exhibit differing net charges. And if you actually hook up a resistor to these two different regions of your typical glass of water, you can actually measure an electric current. You might consider that you don't actually know what you are arguing against.
Re: "The problem isn't a lack of rigor in dismissing bizarre claims, it's a lack of rigor in the claims themselves."
This is a stunning display of irony -- for you've arrived at this conclusion without any actual process for learning or tracking the claims.
Re: "Lastly there is no such thing as 'settled science'."
By "settled science", I am referring to the idea that we can assume that some questions are settled, without any need to track them for vindications over time. It is clear from your own comments that settled science is very real.
Re: "The areas you cite (with the exception of Pollack) don't even bother to make predictions, they're just folks jumping up and down yammering 'acknowledge my theory, acknowledge my theory'."
Some of our most important ideas in the sciences today originated in just this manner, actually. And in fact, pet theories are actually quite common amongst even academics.
And, by the way, they actually do make predictions -- which is the first link that comes up if you type into Google "electric universe predictions".
Maybe the coastal tides were 0.001mm higher.
I'm sure they were logging that data back then. It was important for Henge building.
No sig today...
David Talbott, Ev Cochrane and Dwardu Cardona refer specifically to the oldest mythological archetypes -- the "archaic" ones. For specific examples, you'd want to search for their talks on youtube.
Realize that Plato broadly cast all of the earliest stories as a recounting of a single event. This quote is very important, due not only to its specificity but also for the unrecognized fact that Plato would appear to be describing the action of gravity -- a concept which he did not understand -- drawing back to Earth a debris field. In fact, this is a very simple explanation for why civilizations like the Mayans created calendars which looked far beyond the prediction of simple seasonal cycles:
... then further on ...
Well then you've hit the nail on the head. Your concern seems to be that as soon as someone sees a buzzword associated with unprovable claims, they dismiss the idea before even examining it. If you were to not use a loaded word and specifically state your hypothesis, critics would have to to directly refute the hypothesis (assuming it is disprovable).
To put it another way, if I start saying that black holes exist due to Quantum Mechanics and String Theory, people will ignore or dismiss me. And rightly so. I didn't say anything useful or disprovable. If enough other people do that within a particular forum, I'd better start stating testable hypotheses or expect to be dismissed out of hand as well.
tl;dr - I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science.
There is nothing at all rigorous about judging something to be "meritless", and then acting upon that judgment by ostracizing anybody who conveys the important message that you have missed some important details since your decision. That's human behavior at its worst, and in terms of process, it should be rid from our academic institutions.
Truthfully, there is no need at all to judge cosmological claims. What is this pressing need to identify a solution? Is something about to happen? There is only need to -- as a group -- track the ideas over time -- so that we can then base our eventual judgment upon their actual performance rather than a handful of mistake-ridden un-reviewed critiques (the "debunkers").
What is really so compelling anyways about suggesting that the universe sprang into existence from nothing? This is nothing more than the original creation story told by the Catholic church, dressed up in mathematical formulae -- which apparently is sufficient to greatly impress some people.
Anthony L. Peratt, ‘Dean of the Plasma Dissidents’, The World & I, May 1988, p.190-197
You might consider what role this has played in the idea's popularity.
Saturn and Jupiter, yeah, you need to know where you are looking to find them.
You can download the SkyMap app (formerly Google Sky) to your phone and it will point them out to you.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
It's just a conceptual label. The core claim of the Electric Universe -- the most important -- is simply that we can model cosmic plasmas as laboratory plasmas. Astrophysicists disagree, and instead model them as fluids subject to gravity. Yet, there is no fluid model which can ever accurately explain the behaviors of electricity and magnetism -- so where we see cosmic plasmas conducting, realize that the models in widespread use by astrophysicists today cannot explain this. By contrast, astrophysicists have rigidly stuck to claims that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality undermine the notion of electricity in space. The recent announcements that electric currents travel along AGN (black hole) jets is an unacknowledged admission that Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality are meaningless conjectures. And those of us who have paid attention to concepts from the plasma laboratory understand that plasma double layers will make Debye shielding and quasi-neutrality meaningless (double layers are what allow the formation of complex macroscopic charge structures in plasmas). But, even though double layers have been definitively observed within both the plasma laboratory and even the Van Allen radiation belts, astrophysicists have refused to classify them as astrophysical entities. There have been a number of observations in recent years where scientists expressed surprise by some observation which was readily explainable with laboratory plasma physics concepts like double layers.
Those who are following the debate can see clearly how this is playing out; those who refuse to track it lack the context necessary to judge the debate's trajectory -- and these are the same people, imo, who have come to accept space as mysterious. Much of the mystery is actually introduced by the idea that gravity is dominating at the larger scales. The electrical cosmology approach generally treats gravity as a localized force which becomes irrelevant at the interstellar scale.
To go into more detail would take many more pages.
The EU arguments about cosmic plasmas can -- and actually have been -- put into mathematical terms by people who have no relation to the Electric Universe at all.
Re: "I have no idea what it is, specifically, that you're upset about that people won't accept as science."
Sort of. What I am actually arguing for is that people should track controversies over time. We need to crowdsource information about controversies, and what I promise is that if we do finally create such a system, it would boost the rate of innovation in the sciences across all disciplines.
The debate over electricity in space is merely a piece of a larger puzzle which speaks to our awkward interactions with scientific claims. That's at least how I view it. It is not the end of the story, and there is a lot of progress which can be made from merely studying the ways that people interact with scientific controversies. This is what I've been doing for 12 years now, and it's how I will design the social network which will eventually fix these problems.
It's important to stress that this is not an idea I came up with last night. My approach was to embed myself into the Thunderbolts Group, and then over the course of many years, I ran their claims directly against their biggest critics + the public. By observing the reactions to the same claims, many times over, you start to observe patterns. The point is not to say that this is all that is important; the point is that the social processes play an inordinate role in how people come to these conclusions. There is very little engagement with actual claims and technical details happening -- and this should to some extent alarm people -- because it should be clear that this is how groupthink can emerge.
They already know who I am because after I was maliciously attacked last week for my electricity in space post, they are the ones who restored my karma. When I complained that I was being down-voted by an angry mob, they agreed. So, it would seem that you've not fully tuned into the situation here.
There is actually some merit to these claims that astrophysicists are not cultured in the observations of laboratory plasmas. When it comes to double layers, plasma pinches and the numerous forms of plasma instabilities, the very specific geometries of filamentation in plasmas (just last week observed at Jupiter's pole, and not a single astrophysicist acknowledged it!), the simple fact that microwaves are produced by electron beams (and hence a CMB can be explained with electricity in space just as easily as a creation event), the concept of quasi-neutrality (and what it really means for conduction in plasmas), the by-now handful of observable violations of Debye screening, the fact that the ionosphere behaves as a plasma with less than 1% ionization, an understanding of the history of the Birkeland current idea, the history of the empty vacuum of space mistake, the history of Alfven's rejection of MHD in his 1970 Nobel acceptance speech, the concept of Marklund convection, the observation of critical ionization velocities associated with HI hydrogen filaments, and a full appreciation of both sides of the magnetic reconnection event ...
... when it comes to each of these topics, it is easy to demonstrate that astrophysicists have not been trained sufficient to reason about these matters in the astrophysical context. They're struggling to identify the points of contention because they've been left with the impression that there is no real debate to be had here.
The argument is not that astrophysicists don't know anything about plasmas. What they know is MHD -- and what has been put forward is the fact that that should not be assumed to always be the proper tool for interpreting astronomical plasmas.
On the specific issue of magnetic reconnection, I was really referring to the fact that there are two separate sides to that debate -- and the astrophysicists, if pressed, would have a difficult time explaining the opposing arguments.
In my opinion, a huge aspect to this problem is the institutional aversion to telling certain awkward stories that relate to these topics. The mistaken assumption of empty interplanetary, interstellar and intergalactic space is perhaps a prime example of a story which academics and science journalists seem to treat as sort of "rated X" insofar as they generally refuse to place any importance on it. Yet, it can be traced back to the selection of numerous theories in the early 1900's. For example,
Eddington explicitly refers to the assumption is his choice of models for powering the Sun:
Although I don't have an authoritative source on hand, it can also be shown that Sydney Chapman used the assumption to reject Kristian Birkeland's proposal that the aurora originated with the Sun.
These are remarkable historical observations insofar as we today know that this assumption was incorrect (And more than that, the mistaken assumption was hiding from Eddington an alternative potential power source.)
The thing about this is that it's rare to see anybody connecting the dots between this former mistaken assumption and the theories which "won out" as popular today -- yet, it is also remarkably easy to show that it did in fact play a part. And there can be little doubt that even Einstein's work could also be implicated as basing on it, for the first instrumented probes were not actually sent to space until 1958 -- 3 years after his death. So, can it be that Einstein was simply working with what he had available to him? The question would seem to be valid, for once plasma is introduced into the conversation, then we can without a doubt formulate alternative hypotheses for all sorts of cosmological observations.
The mainstream would be wise to start telling the story of this mistake, for it is extremely important. I try to explain why here.
It's not clear to me that the Neanderthals, the Denisovians, etc. were actually separate species rather than merely geographic variants. There clearly were some anatomical differences, but that doesn't really suffice. Saint Bernards and Chihuahuas are the same species.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Do you really think a human 70,000 years ago without any astronomic tools would have noticed? Or even cared?
Reading the article, while it is normally a 10th magnitude and not visible to the unaided eye, it apparently is the type of star that flares up a thousand times brighter which would put it in the range of a bight star in the sky. Given the importance of the sky, comets, stars are to primitive cultures, I'd say a new bright red star in the sky probably would be of some note to any living people at the time.
Let's review each of the many problems and oversights in your logic.
First, realize that Einstein died 3 years before (1955) anybody definitively understood that the universe is dominated by plasma (1958). Do you know why? Because for 24 long years -- from 1920 to 1944 -- the American public ridiculed Robert Goddard, the first person to suggest that we could send a rocket to the Moon, for not understanding that a "rocket would have nothing in space to push against" (a common misconception back then). Do you know what stopped the ridicule? The Germans took Goddard's invention and attacked Europe with 3,000 V2 rockets. Those V2's had all of Goddard's key inventions within them, because as the American public was mocking Goddard, the Germans were intently listening to everything he said.
Apparently, the American public learned nothing at all from that event, because to this day, we continue to ridicule innovators in the sciences. Like Don Scott of the Thunderbolts Group, Goddard was an American professor.
Re: "The scientific community says "gravity has to work pretty closely to how we think or satellites (among otehr things) wouldn't be possible and they clearly are"
Einstein lifted the Lorentz transformation from the aether theorists of the day. He did not invent this math.
Re: "So you need to come back with proof that you theory is at least as good as gravity in all areas that gravity is useful and can therefore replace it entirely or reconcile the parts that contradict gravity before it can be considered a viable addition to scientific knowledge"
The Electric Universe does not begin in the same place as conventional astronomy and cosmology. It starts by recognizing that the cosmic plasma models widely applied by astrophysicists are wrong -- and once the models are corrected to reflect our laboratory observations, the dark matter problem goes away. From that vantage point, options open up for how to proceed to explain gravity. But, Anthony Peratt's galactic simulation with proper rotation curves explains what is happening at the largest scales without need for any dark matter -- meaning that it essentially meets your criteria above (just not in the way that you imagined).
The point is that we have "potential wins" on both sides of this debate. It is not a one-sided affair, for instruments designed to detect dark matter have grown a million times more sensitive over the past 15 years -- meaning that dark matter is starting to look like modern cosmology's dead end.
You could have reasoned your way to the same conclusion without having to build all of those instruments, actually, by simply considering the ridiculous scales we are talking about here: If the Earth was just an inch from the Sun, the next nearest star would be a stunning 4 miles away (!). Simple logic and some very simple algebra is screaming at you that gravity is a "localized" force, starting at the interstellar scale.
Re: "General relativity works very well and is empirically verified by things like GPS satellites"
There are plenty of rebuttals online to this thoughtless claim. I encourage you to look them up. They're not difficult to find.
Re: "Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell)"
All that I can say is: Welcome to the Space Age -- a revolution which is, apparently, still playing out.
Quantum Statistics of Nonideal Plasmas
The whole point is that this observation is a vindication for the approach proposed by David Talbott and Ev Cochrane, and yet none of the people here noticed because it was decided that the Electric Universe is "debunked". It should present us with an important lesson about process.
Personally, I believe it because I spent a few years running the Electric Universe claims against their critics. I observed the reactions, and came to realize that there is a widespread refusal to simply let the cards fall where they may. Everybody is trying to force-fit the data into their pre-existing narratives and conclusions.
I also noticed that vindications for electrical cosmology occur far more often than people realize. They convince themselves that they can ignore the idea, then they don't notice when these vindications occur. There was one just last week, with the infrared images of Jupiter's pole. The ring of vortices is a classic form from the plasma laboratory which has been observed for almost a full century now. In the early days, plasma physicists would etch electrical discharges into various media like paper, and a very common form was a ring of vortices. This is a typical shape that electricity takes when it travels through gas: The plasma filaments break up into a ring of smaller filaments (vortices in 2d cross-section). Anthony Peratt has written a couple of papers detailing these "instabilities". In fact, some people refer to them as "Peratt instabilities".
For people who refuse to track the Electric Universe debate, the infrared ring of vortices at Jupiter's two poles are a mystery. Not a single astrophysicist on Twitter or elsewhere seemed to recognize this classic laboratory plasma form. I was personally stunned -- but I'm not sure why, because it's happened many times before. For those of us who have taken the time to learn about laboratory plasmas from this debate, we immediately recognize this form -- because it is common.
Do you see what is happening here? It's very serious and very bad. Science has become so specialized that scientists cannot recognize valid critiques from neighboring domains. And since nobody is tracking controversies, there have been many other examples of such vindications which went completely unnoticed.
I 100% agree: People who rant about chemtrails are literally mentally ill. Joe Rogan had an excellent rebuttal to this nonsense on one of his shows; I want to create a transcript, it was so good.
It wasn't just an uninformed public who made fun of Goddard. You're looking at the past through the lens of the present. Our cultural origins were more confused than this. We did not spring out of our intellectual womb, fully formed, like from the stork. Mistakes were made. Very, very big mistakes.
"'Space' was invented on Earth before we knew what was out there"
Re: "Because it is mysticism instead they claim that all things are plasma (because complex nuanced positions are hard to sell)"
Each quote admits that plasma is 99% of what we can see, so realize that if there is no dark matter, plasma is next in line for being the explanation.
I keep a personal library of modern science critiques. I know how it works by now, probably more so than most specialists -- many of which never seek to actually become generalists. It doesn't happen without trying.
That's missing the point. Scientists have for years now struggled to explain how to get from gravitational accretion to the planetary system we see today. And observing other stellar systems has only served to elevate the mystery. So, what would we expect to see if a foreign star was to come close enough that it actually was very much visible? We'd expect that it should shuffle the planets around in a manner which leaves us as confused as we are.
We might also expect to see something very much like this:
This is a photograph of one of those imprints made by a plasma filament. See the article for more information.