Nasa: 'Crash' with star barely scratched the bumper

20 February 2015 - 02:22 By Staff reporter
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Artist's conception of Scholz's star and its brown dwarf companion (foreground) during its flyby of the solar system 70,000 years ago.
Artist's conception of Scholz's star and its brown dwarf companion (foreground) during its flyby of the solar system 70,000 years ago.
Image: Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester.

A recently discovered stellar neighbour penetrated the edges of our solar system at around the same time that humans began spreading from Africa into Eurasia, according to a report.

Scientists with Nasa's wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer mission found a red dwarf star in 2013 that was orbited by a brown dwarf companion about 19.6 light years away, according to Nature.

The star, nicknamed Scholz's star after the German astronomer who discovered it, was speeding away from us.

Astronomer Eric Mamajek at the University of Rochester in New York led a team that traced the star's trajectory.

"The small tangential motion and proximity initially indicated that the star was most likely either moving towards a future close encounter with the solar system, or it had 'recently' come close to the solar system and was moving away. Sure enough, the radial velocity measurements were consistent with it running away from the sun's vicinity - and we realised it must have had a close flyby in the past," Mamajek said.

The star is relatively puny so it probably did not impact the cloud too badly.

Any comets it sent hurtling towards us would probably take another few hundred thousand years to hit us.

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