70,000 Years Ago When a Real Shooting Star Passed by at Close…

uh did you know about THIS one…

Apparently astronomers figured out something not a lot of people are aware of.  A shooting star passed us by.  Like super close and they used some complicated formulas to figure this out.

Here is a bit on how they calculated the position of the star that came so close:

Researchers observing the stars found that by recording the change in distance from the Sun to the stars and the star’s motion across the sky they could determine the trajectory of the ancient objects. By tracing its movements back in time, they found its close shave with the Sun occurred as recent as 70,000 years ago. The binary star system has a low mass and it was speeding by our solar system at the time which means that the effects caused on the Oort Cloud were very small. Currently Scholz star lies around 20 light years away in the constellation of Monoceros, so at least we haven’t got to worry about that happening again. Or maybe we have… Dr Mamajek of the University of Rochester estimates that a rogue star probably passes through the Oort Cloud every 100,000 years, or so.

Needless to say, we’re glad there was enough distance although it would have been cool to see!  Maybe next one but let’s not focus on that too much 😉

Ok are you ready to check out a simulation of this…

Let’s find out more on what happened and check out the video on page 2

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16 Comments

  1. Dwight Wyble said:

    So this red dwarf and its companion pass within the ort cloud, wouldn’t it have its own ort cloud with this said. Wouldn’t those be even closer to the planets and left some residue(comets) from the encounter that should be still around?

  2. Dusty Hampton said:

    They can if slung by a black hole or another star. Planets are shot from their orbits all of the time by another celestial bodies and usually become rouge planets. It’s the same with stars, if a star were to orbit a black hole (preferably a super massive black hole) close enough, it can be slung out of the galaxy and sped up to a third of the speed of light in the process if conditions are right.

  3. David Pace said:

    The mere fact that you would say that a “star” becomes a rogue “planet” would indicate to me that you truly do not comprehend the composition of stars….

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