And if a large, slow-moving star did pass through the edge of the Oort Cloud, it could really shake up the solar system. Nonetheless, a few stars should still come surprisingly close. “Statistically, most of those stars would pass the outer edge of our solar system.” That means encounters like the one with Scholz’s Star are common, but only a few are close enough to actually dislodge a significant number of comets, However, “space is big,” Mamajek points out. But they suspect roughly 20 stars should pass within just a couple light-years of us every million years. However, the vast majority of close encounters have yet to be discovered, the team suggests. They discovered nearly 700 stars that will pass within 15 light-years of our solar system over just the next 15 million years. In 2018, a team of researchers led by Coryn Bailer-Jones of the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Germany, used Gaia data to plot our Sun’s future meet-ups with other stars. And, thanks to a European Space Agency satellite called Gaia, which is built to map the precise locations and movements of over a billion stars, we now know about other close encounters. But in the meantime, other astronomers have also taken up the work. Mamajek has since moved on from studying Scholz’s Star. This status prompted them to name the cosmic trespasser after its initial discoverer, an astronomer named Ralf-Dieter Scholz, who’s devoted significant time to finding nearby stars. In fact, it passed closer to our Sun than any other known star. The two astronomers and their colleagues would eventually show that it passed even closer than that. ![]() “It was screaming through the solar neighborhood.” “Within five or 10 minutes, we had the initial results that this thing came within a parsec of the Sun,” Mamajek says. As the astronomers continued talking, Ivanov measured the star’s radial velocity to learn how quickly it was moving toward or away from our Sun. Since it didn’t appear to be moving much side to side, the star was likely moving toward us or away from us at a breathtaking pace. The star caught Mamajek’s interest because it was just about 20 light-years away, but astronomers hadn’t noticed it thanks to its dim nature and tiny apparent movement (or proper motion) across our night sky. While the two chatted, Ivanov was looking at recent observations of a star cataloged as WISE J072003.20–084651.2. “ probably didn’t have a huge impact, but there should be many more stars that have passed through that are more massive,” astronomer Eric Mamajek of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, whose 2015 paper in Astrophysical Journal Letters put Scholz’s Star on the map, tell Astronomy.Īround Christmas 2013, Mamajek was visiting a friend and fellow astronomer, Valentin Ivanov, at the offices of the European Southern Observatory in Santiago, Chile. In fact, we’re on track for a much more dramatic close encounter in the not-too-distant future. Scholz’s Star wasn’t the first flyby, and it won’t be the last. ![]() But in recent years, scientists have been finding that these kinds of encounters happen far more often than once expected. However, Scholz’s Star is relatively small and rapidly moving, which should have minimized its effect on the solar system. Some astronomers even think Scholz’s Star could have sent some of these objects tumbling into the inner solar system when it passed. Its orbital path indicated that, about 70,000 years ago, it passed through the Oort Cloud, the extended sphere of icy bodies that surrounds the fringes of our solar system. This small binary star system was discovered in 2013. The most famous of these stellar interlopers is called Scholz’s Star. But, every once in a while, one comes so close that it gains a prominent place in Earth’s night sky, as well as knocks distant comets loose from their orbits. Every 50,000 years or so, a nomadic star passes near our solar system.
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