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
“It even has one chance in 1,000 of approaching close enough… In 1.5 million years… I’m so scared!”
Atually even if the star just passes through the Oort cloud the results on Earth will be fairly drastic. A very large number of comets will be perturbed into the solar system, and a number of them will end up hitting Earth.
The last time we had such an episode with numerous impacts was during the Eocene about 35 million years ago. Earth switched from a hothouse to an icehouse climate at about the same time, but nobody knows if there is a connection.
If humanity is to survive as a species, we’ve got to get off this planet and colonise the solar system. Our odds of survival increases at that point. If we don’t, expect homo sapiens to become extinct. Like the dinosaurs. It’s all well and good to contemplate our navels but you have to look around once in a while. The universe is a hostile place and we’ve been very lucky so far.
This may be the best thing that could happen to us. We know are sun is not going to last forever so this could give us the chance to select a sun that has a longer life. Given the time, we should be able to move the earth and other planets where they can be picked up by the new star.
Kath,
Why can’t we bombard Mars with seedlings, fungus, etc. that will grow in the Martian environment? It will probably take a few hundred years to get that garden going (i.e., to start an active hydro/carbon cycle on Mars).
Chris:
Terraforming of mars is something that was contemplated some time ago.
See here:
http://www.howstuffworks.com/terraforming.htm
and then there is the “ethics” of terraforming:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics_of_terraforming
….and factoring in the rotation of the earth and some wobbling, etc. The star is going to hit France first!
Are they issuing superforecasts?
Planetary constraint detected.
Well, as an atheist I’ll be dead by then, but I feel for my Christian friends who’ll have to tend with this.
We don’t care about it either Chrietoph.
Dena (09:45:13) :
Given the time, we should be able to move the earth and other planets where they can be picked up by the new star.
What you need is my new invention:
The Acme Planet Pump.
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The other day I was explaining to one of our local wardens why I was displaying a parking badge 4 years out of date; because it was probably done on a program using 256 colours, and in 252 years it will come round again. Now suppose I’m wrong, and the program was 1.5 million colours? Damn!
1.5 million years?
Dang. I was planning to wash the car that day.
Maybe we can divert the yuppie attention to diverting a star instead of diverting climate change. At least with diverting a star, we’d have a space program for the next 1.5 million years.
Christoph, I think your Christian Friends will be looking forward to watching the show from a front row and safe seat.
WEll here’s hoping it gets a lot closer than that, because we are going to need its earthlike planets to go and colonize; since we arte likely to pass peak oil around the time it gets here; and will be needing more energy. But we’ll still be working on free clean green renewable energy along with thermonuclear fusion energy; which a mill years form now will be at the head of the pack of the “Energy of the Future” race.
Well y’alls have a good time with your new star home; I’ll pass on waiting for that.
If the heliopause is constructed as a shell of expanded solar wind, the free electrons on the outer fringes of both stars heliopauses will be mutually repellent. The question then is, are the combined repulsive deflection generating forces enough to keep them from colliding by more than balancing the force of gravity between them.
Then on the other hand we should be able to better evaluate the solar system barycenter hypothesis as the interaction shifts /or not / the balance of the sun around which pivot point? I would expect that as soon as the effects are felt on the climate via the changes in the tidal forces from the incoming star, as it shifts the orbital patterns from the normals now, way before there is a chance of impact from disturbed bodies in the Oort clouds.
(god little hadron collider in action?)
On second thought surfing will be great during the orbital period that we make closest approach and the annual “Tidal wave season” gives the surfers something exciting to do.
@supercritical:
“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?”
Count isn’t really an appropriate term here. Red/blue shift applies everywhere, its a bit like the doppler effect (the way a police siren is higher in pitch when approaching you then is lower after it passes) but with light. If a star is moving away from us then it’s light will have a slightly lower frequency than would be expected (absorption frequencies of specific elements can be used to measure this) and so it’s colour is shifted redwards. If a star is moving towards us then all the frequencies go up and the colour is a little bluer.
The stars we can see are simply orbiting the core of our galaxy just as we are, not all are orbiting at the same speed though and nor are most on circular orbits so there’s plenty of relative towards and away movements between stars going on. A similar thing applies to galaxies in our local group. Our nearest galaxy, Andromeda, is infact blue shifted, and as mentioned above, is on a possible collision course (the sideways velocity is hard to measure so it may miss). That’s not for 2-3 billion years however, so Gliese 710 is a more pressing concern…. 🙂
For universe expansion, it is measured on galactic clusters and is shown by a strong correlation between distance and the amount of red shift and various theories explain this as the expansion of space and then we get into dark energy etc etc.
Rotation creates and holds energy in density. Which being on an axis is 2 dimensional even though we have a 3 dimensional shape.
Here is how energy is stored and density changes and compresses mass.
Take a wheel with spokes. On each spoke, put a light spring over the spoke. Then place a weight that can slide up and down this spoke.
Make sure the weight is to the center side.
Now rotate this wheel and the weight will compress the spring. Essentially compressing mass. When rotational energy is stop being applied, the stored energy is slowly released until it comes to a full stop.
Is it Kosher to mingle your Oort cloud with passing strangers? I mean, if we start swapping bits of stuff with other stars, who knows where it might end. Perhaps some of the larger KBOs might get de-orbited a bit and leave the KBelt…
We could end up with Pluto in an orbit free of KBOs and then we’d have to restore it to Planetary status (round due to gravity, orbiting sun, no junk in it’s orbit…)
And just think what this will do to the astrological charts 😉
supercritical:
Stars in this galaxy are orbiting the mass center. As they do so, all are on orbits that cross paths with the orbits of others. It would be expected that two stars could be approaching the intersection of their orbits at the same time. With hundreds of billions of stars in the swarm, this would be a fairly common occurrence.
In the same way, galaxies in clusters of galaxies are orbiting the mass center of the cluster. Some of these orbits come near the orbits of other galaxies and sometimes two galaxies are both approaching the intersection of their orbits, etc., etc.
Supercrit: While the star is approaching, there is blue shift. After it passes, there will be a red-shift.
If in 1.5 million years, we can’t deal with a barrage (geologically speaking) of comets, we deserve what we get.
While obviously not an immediate threat, the report is disturbing. A similar event is thought to have happened about 3.8 billion years ago, sending hundreds, and possibly thousands, of comets crashing through the solar system : the ‘Late Heavy Bombardment’.
Most of the impact craters we see on the moon and elsewhere in the solar system date from this time. It is thought that most of the water on Earth came from these icy comets – there were a LOT of them!
If this happened again it would most likely sterilise the surface of the Earth, and possibly destroy higher life forms in the seas and oceans. Although life seems to be ‘built in’ to the universe we do not know how common complex multi-cellular life forms are, such as plants and animals. Life as it is on Earth may be fairly unique, so it would be sad to think of it being destroyed.
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When the Andromeda galaxy merges with the Milky Way in about 4 billion years time the probability of suns colliding is actually very low, so the Sun may be totally unaffected. However our sun will be approaching its red giant stage so Earth would be toast anyway [literally!]. I had hoped that complex lifeforms on Earth would at least have until this time [and preferably longer by finding ways to move round our galaxy!]
I hope that by the time all this transpires that they (whoever ‘they’ are) are finally able to use this event to:
a. Get all the planets on the same plane (or is that plain)
b. Terraform Venus and put Pluto in orbit as it’s moon
c. Collide Saturn with, and ignite Jupiter so we can have a second star in the sky.
d. Move the Moon closer to speed up Earth’s rotation and shorten the day (would probably cool things off a little too).
e. Use the debris of the asteroid belt and the two moons of Mars
to give folks on that planet something decent to look at from the surface at night.
If I only had more time I could think of a thousand things for them (whoever ‘them’ is) to do.
I believe we can avert this disaster by implementing an immediate tax on oil companies and banks as well as increasing all income taxes across the board. We should then give tax credits to all minorities and under employed since they will be the most affected by a red dwarf in the solar system.
Next, billions of dollars should be sent to universities to study the phenomenon and we should create the UN IPRD to propose further recommendations.