From Russia’s RT News
Star on course to meet Solar system identified
Movement of an orange dwarf star with a mass of about half that of the Sun will eventually bring it right to the solar system, stellar data analysis indicates.
The Gliese 710 from the constellation Serpens Cauda is due to arrive in about 1.5 million years, and has an 86 per cent probability of passing through the Oort Cloud, says Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg.
The prediction is based on analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos astrometric spacecraft, which measured velocities of almost 120,000 stars in the early 1990s, as well as some recent data.
Bobylev analyzed the measured movements of about 35,000 stars in our neighborhood in the time interval from 2 million years in the past to 2 million years in the future. It resulted in adding nine new stars to the list of those which experience close encounters with the Solar system – either in the past or in the future, he reports in a paper published on arXiv.org website. (PDF)
GL 710 was already known to have a scheduled rendezvous with us. However, Bobylev’s analysis indicates a high chance of passing closer than expected. It even has one chance in 1,000 of approaching close enough to significantly affect objects within the Kuiper Belt, i.e. planets, moons and asteroids. This could be bad news for our descendants.
The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical cloud of comets on the solar system’s boundaries, stretching about one light year away from the sun.
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This same news story is also at Discovery News
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Need to give NASA some goals — 1.5M years to get off of this rock seems more reasonable then the most recent 5 year plan.
R Stevenson (01:45:48) :
Alpha Centauri is 4.37 ly from the Sun.
supercritical: Here’s me thinking that the cosmological idea that the universe is universally expanding, means that everything is flying apart from everything else, and the further the faster, according to the measurements of ‘red shift’.
Cosmological expansion is a very weak effect. It appears only at very large distances, between objects that are not gravitationally bound. A single galaxy such as the Milky Way Galaxy is gravitationally bound together, so cosmological expansion has no local effect. Stars can move in any direction within the galaxy.
Something else that the designers of the nuclear waste repository will have to design for….
Does this mean Pluto will run off?
Stupid mutt better stay out of interstellar traffic…
@supercritical
The cosmologial red shift at intra-galactic distances is negligible, and all the stars are moving constantly around the galaxy and between themselves, both towards us and away from us. Relative velocity is actually a criteria for differentiating between “new” stars and “pre-galactic” stars, since they have completely different velocity profiles.
@R Stevenson
If I remember correctly a Centauri is at two times that distance, but anyway, not that it changes anything.
Anyway, if Gliese doesn’t bring Global Warping, Andromeda will do, since it is in collision course with the Milky Way. Behold the power of CO2!
Now NASA has a Mission!
If I was into reincarnation, then I’d have something to worry about — in approximately 15,000 lifetimes or so. There’s a far more worrying prospect — that of having to face reincarnations of Al Gore over 15,000 lifetimes.
The consequence of a star moving into or near the Oort cloud would be that it would disturb the motions of Oort objects. Some of them would head in towards the inner solar system and might threaten the earth with impact as was hypothsized for “Nemesis”.
Nemesis at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)
“The Nemesis Affair”, by David Raup, is an interesting book for today, not so much because of the “death star” theory, but because of what it says about “the ways of science”. Very relevant to Gorebull Warbling.
Dwarf Stars are attracted to Global Warming = we must kill CO2 at all costs.
Being serious now.
Isn’t our galaxy moving further away, along with the rest f the stars (expanding away from the center) ?
Why is that Dwarf expanding faster?
More research is necessary to determine what impact this close encounter may have on earth. Please add research funds to the annual budget for the next 1.5 million years.
1.5 million years! And this is news why?
I blame Bush.
NASA still has not realized that space is 2 dimensional and that objects rotating can only travel on one plane from the source. If rotating objects energy mass when rotating were to explode, then it can ONLY be spread in a 2 dimensional circular direction. Not like in fictional stories where it explodes in all directions.
So if our sun went NOVA, best place to be would be orbiting above the poles. But far enough away that a vacuum pull couldn’t pull you into it when it spreads away.
A near miss could be worse than a direct hit as the two systems may try to attract each other to become a black hole.
REPLY: Above the poles? Beyond wrong.
Thanks for the answers. Given that red shift doesn’t count in our galaxy, then how can they tell whether this object is coming or going?
“Nemesis” indeed hopefully we will be off this rock and out into the Galaxy
by then,either that or we will be painting our bodies blue….
If the navel gazers have their way///
1.5 million year?
Enough time for another bath.
🙂
I tried this story on Facebook but didn’t get anybody signing up to the B-Ark passenger list.
[If you don’t know what this is all about: see HHGTTG (Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy)]
From the abstract [http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.2160]:
“To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation.”
Not a good idea. See: http://rqgravity.net/PtolemyIsDead
OH BOY! Something else to be scared of!
lowercasefred (04:49:22) :
Nemesis at Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(star)
“The Nemesis Affair”, by David Raup, is an interesting book for today, not so much because of the “death star” theory, but because of what it says about “the ways of science”. Very relevant to Gorebull Warbling.
If you want to play around with a Nemesis star approaching the inner solar system, you can try my simulator where all planets + lots of real comets and asteroids can be simulated. It can also simulate imaginary objects like an incoming Nemesis star (XML file included for that purpose!)
http://arnholm.org/astro/software/ssg/
It is quite fun watching Mars leave the solar system after a Nemesis encounter. Sometimes, the Moon becomes a planet of its own when Earth is unable to hold on to it.
Not the most accurate simulator ever made, but still fun and instructive.
I just opened a Gliese 710 Exchange, where you can buy “Gliese 710 Credits” on the global market. Kleiner & Perkins (Al Gore’s VC firm) put up the money an hour ago.
Get ready for the new film from Al, “A REALLY Inconvenient Truth”!
“We’re in the money….”
This danger is due to gravity, right? Therefore, according to the precautionary principle we have to become gravity-neutral. Maybe we ought to be doubly cautious and buy some gravity credits from Alpha Centauri.
Let’s see, for the last million years or so earth’s climate has followed an approximately 100,000 year ice-age cycle, consisting of glacial advance (about 90,000 years) followed by a brief interglacial (about 10,000 years). So in 1.5 million years when this star gets close, we will have been through about 15 more of these cycles …