70,000 Years Ago a Shooting Star Passed By At Very Close Range

Here is a bit more 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 😉

We hope you like the video and check back for updates on this story as they figure more out.

thanks to TheVendor101 for the great info



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14 Comments

  7. Russ Sands said:

    .8 light years isn’t all that close as your sensationalist title suggests. Close for something that size, sure, but we wouldn’t have even seen it since it was a brown dwarf

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