Close shave.

February 18, 2015 12:58 PM

Astronomers have discovered that a red dwarf and a brown dwarf (a binary system known as Scholz's star) passed through our Solar System's Oort Cloud a mere 70,000 years ago.
posted by brundlefly (72 comments total)

Well, that's utterly terrifying. And here I was worried about Rogue planets. I wonder if any other nearby suns are hurtling towards us right now.

Also, I wonder how visible it was in the night sky at its closest approach.
posted by leotrotsky at 1:02 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Grand theft Oort-o?

(Cringe.) Please don't, Beeb.
posted by aught at 1:05 PM on February 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

The origins of Nemesis?
posted by NoxAeternum at 1:05 PM on February 18, 2015

Scary stuff. Makes me think of the short story "A Pail of Air". Spaceship earth indeed!
posted by Poldo at 1:05 PM on February 18, 2015 [17 favorites]

Awesome! Planet X!
posted by stinkfoot at 1:08 PM on February 18, 2015

Wholey crap!
posted by From Bklyn at 1:08 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

How long does it take for a gravitationally-disturbed Oort Cloud object to reach in the inner solar system? Hopefully not 70,000 years.
posted by spaltavian at 1:09 PM on February 18, 2015

At least 70,005 I'd think. There's time.
posted by Naberius at 1:14 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I think closer to 2 million years, actually. Maybe a better equipped mathemagician can confirm.
posted by Dark Messiah at 1:14 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

But 65,000 years ago, give or take a few, a rather large rock hit The Yucatan Penninsula, and did some damage, give or take a few years. Depending on a number of things that might be one source of earthly disruption.
posted by Oyéah at 1:19 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

The origins of Nemesis?

I heard references to the idea of a nearby, hidden star called Nemesis in pop culture since the mid 90s. What's the source?
posted by clarknova at 1:20 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The scale on that diagram is very misleading if you're not paying close attention. If Earth is an inch from the sun, the Oort Cloud ought to extend a hundred thousand inches to the right. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt that they're just fitting it on the page, but it's just too much of a coincidence that it also makes the story seem a lot sexier than it really is.
posted by Sys Rq at 1:21 PM on February 18, 2015 [17 favorites]

Scary stuff. Makes me think of the short story "A Pail of Air".

Makes me think of When Worlds Collide.
posted by Gelatin at 1:21 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Nemesis is a hypothetical red dwarf[1] or brown dwarf,[2] originally postulated in 1984 to be orbiting the Sun at a distance of about 95,000 AU (1.5 light-years),[2] somewhat beyond the Oort cloud, to explain a perceived cycle of mass extinctions in the geological record, which seem to occur more often at intervals of 26 million years.[2][3]
posted by jepler at 1:23 PM on February 18, 2015 [9 favorites]

A red dwarf and a brown dwarf walk into a solar system. Sun asks, "Can I help you boys?" One says, "I'm not happy." The Sun says, "Well which one are you?"

/runs away
posted by resurrexit at 1:23 PM on February 18, 2015 [40 favorites]

I think that resurrexit's joke might be the cause of mass extinctions at intervals of 26 million years.
posted by jepler at 1:28 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Yuggoth is even stranger than we thought.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:30 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

The scale on that diagram is very misleading if you're not paying close attention. If Earth is an inch from the sun, the Oort Cloud ought to extend a hundred thousand inches to the right. I'd give them the benefit of the doubt that they're just fitting it on the page, but it's just too much of a coincidence that it also makes the story seem a lot sexier than it really is.

That's a logarithmic distance scale. Every equally-spaced marking is 10x the previous one. There's pretty much no other way to illustrate a solar system.
posted by rocket88 at 1:30 PM on February 18, 2015 [16 favorites]

> But 65,000 years ago, give or take a few, a rather large rock hit The Yucatan Penninsula

That was 65,000,000 years ago, not 65,000. (I know, geologic time gets really confusing and I had to check Wikipedia to be sure.)
posted by benito.strauss at 1:31 PM on February 18, 2015 [14 favorites]

I would almost be willing to see myself and all I love and cherish destroyed in a planetary conflagration of fire and destruction raining from the heavens beneath a baleful, second red sun if I knew for sure that it would also take out the Koch brothers.
posted by Naberius at 1:37 PM on February 18, 2015 [19 favorites]

Yeah, I was confused for a sec there. Did the Yucatan get hit again 65K years ago? Bad luck!
posted by brundlefly at 1:37 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Melancholia?
posted by gucci mane at 1:40 PM on February 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

Well, right now they're 20ish light years away and have an apparent magnitude of 18.3 so they have an absolute magnitude of 16.8. So working that backwards, when they were 0.82 light years away they would have had an apparent magnitude of 11.4 which is a little over 100 times fainter than the dimmest thing you can see with the naked eye.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 1:41 PM on February 18, 2015 [12 favorites]

However in 4 billion years the Andromeda Galaxy is going to collide with ours! It's going to be a hell of a show and totally worth the wait!
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 1:42 PM on February 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I would almost be willing to see myself and all I love and cherish destroyed in a planetary conflagration

You have taken "burn down the village to save it" to its logical extreme, I suppose.
posted by GenjiandProust at 1:42 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

How fucking big and far is the Oort Cloud? "Voyager 1, the fastest and farthest of the interplanetary space probes currently exiting the Solar System, will reach the Oort cloud in about 300 years and would take about 30,000 years to pass through it."
posted by Iridic at 1:43 PM on February 18, 2015 [26 favorites]

Ok, so I have to do the responsible thing and post a link to the preprint. Since astronomy has no commercial relevance, we get to share and enjoy full text articles via the magic of ArXiv:

The Closest Known Flyby of a Star to the Solar System
Eric E. Mamajek, Scott A. Barenfeld, Valentin D. Ivanov, Alexei Y. Kniazev, Petri Vaisanen, Yuri Beletsky, Henri M. J. Boffin
2015, Astrophysical Journal Letters, 800, L17
arXiv:1502.04655

Passing stars can perturb the Oort Cloud, triggering comet showers and potentially extinction events on Earth. We combine velocity measurements for the recently discovered, nearby, low-mass binary system WISE J072003.20-084651.2 ("Scholz's star") to calculate its past trajectory. Integrating the Galactic orbits of this ~0.15 M_o binary system and the Sun, we find that the binary passed within only 52+23-14 kiloAU (0.25+0.11-0.07 parsec) of the Sun 70+15-10 kiloyears ago (1 sigma uncertainties), i.e. within the outer Oort Cloud. This is the closest known encounter of a star to our solar system with a well-constrained distance and velocity. Previous work suggests that flybys within 0.25 pc occur infrequently (~0.1/Myr). We show that given the low mass and high velocity of the binary system, the encounter was dynamically weak. Using the best available astrometry, our simulations suggest that the probability that the star penetrated the outer Oort Cloud is ~98%, but the probability of penetrating the dynamically active inner Oort Cloud (<20 kiloAU) is ~0.0001. While the flyby of this system likely caused negligible impact on the flux of long-period comets, the recent discovery of this binary highlights that dynamically important Oort Cloud perturbers may be lurking among nearby stars.

[Edited to translate TeX formatting and notation for readability. It's a short and sweet paper but the figure isn't that exciting...]
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:45 PM on February 18, 2015 [14 favorites]

I am sure the Koch brothers have a fully stocked emergency space shuttle made primarily from the skin and bones of their interns.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 1:45 PM on February 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

Just read that last line of the abstract again, but add your own dramatic music cue:
"... dynamically important Oort Cloud perturbers may be lurking among nearby stars. "
posted by RedOrGreen at 1:47 PM on February 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

So a red dwarf and brown dwarf just passed by without stopping to say hello? How rude. This is the sort of thing that wouldn't have happened 1 million years ago, but today's youth...!
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 1:52 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Dynamically Important Oort Cloud Perturbers are okay. I like some of their early stuff.
posted by brundlefly at 1:52 PM on February 18, 2015 [17 favorites]

So much for the 5 billion year lifespan of the Sun.
posted by charlie don't surf at 1:52 PM on February 18, 2015

From the twisted minds of Wes Anderson and Roland Emmerich comes... The Midnight Coterie of Oort Cloud Perturbers.
posted by Naberius at 1:54 PM on February 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

52+23-14 kiloAU

I've never seen this before; is this sort of notation used for when the error is not symmetric about the estimated value?
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:08 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

I heard references to the idea of a nearby, hidden star called Nemesis in pop culture since the mid 90s. What's the source?

Shortly after the Alvarez-Alvarez theory of the K-T boundary event got traction as a trigger for a mass-extinction event, some other people kicked around the idea of periodic mass extinction events triggered by a distant binary companion disrupting the Oort cloud. However the mass extinction events described don't appear to be as periodic as first assumed, we have better non-impact theories for some of the events such as the Permian, and a candidate object hasn't been found. My dim memory of adolescence is that at least one of the names kicked around for this object was Shiva, but Nemesis won out.

There was an article floating around recently about a possible Earth-sized trans-Neptunian object. The orbital dynamics of identified trans-Neptunian objects are consistent with at least one body with a mass similar to Earth¹, and some of the exosolar planet candidates challenge theories that such a body is impossible.

1: Hypothetical object might throw a wrench into the "cleared orbit" definition of a planet.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:24 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Dynamically Important Oort Cloud Perturbers are okay. I like some of their early stuff.

Their more recent stuff is really out there.
posted by Ray Walston, Luck Dragon at 2:27 PM on February 18, 2015 [13 favorites]

Yeah, the "52+23-14 kiloAU" notation threw me for a while too. I came to the same guess as you did. Though how one gets asymmetrical intervals from "1 sigma uncertainties" implies an error model that's more sophisticated than just assuming a Normal distribution.

(It also took a while to parse 'M_o' as 'solar mass', as 'O_o' really pushed me towards "one regular eye, one eyebrow arched really wiggly".)
posted by benito.strauss at 2:27 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

HOLY FUCK THAT'S TERRIFYING. I AM COMPLETELY SHITTING IN TERROR RIGHT NOW.
posted by shmegegge at 2:30 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Come on, wimps.

That's dark matter to you, bucko.
posted by ennui.bz at 2:35 PM on February 18, 2015 [22 favorites]

Wikipedia says "At closest approach the star would have had an apparent magnitude of about 10.3.", so it would not have been visible. Also "Comets perturbed from the Oort cloud would require roughly 2 million years to get to the inner Solar System", so if the bugs from Klendathu were using this red dwarf to fling rocks at Earth they're going to take awhile still to get here.
posted by Nelson at 2:36 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

So much for the 5 billion year lifespan of the Sun.

And 70,000 years of smegging Red Dwarf reruns.
posted by a lungful of dragon at 2:41 PM on February 18, 2015 [5 favorites]

When Scholz's comes home
So good
To our stellar neighborhood
It's a cool flame, an slow fire
It's got a low mass and it acts real tired
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 2:49 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

We need a plan.
posted by clavdivs at 2:54 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Also "Comets perturbed from the Oort cloud would require roughly 2 million years to get to the inner Solar System", so if the bugs from Klendathu were using this red dwarf to fling rocks at Earth they're going to take awhile still to get here.

They're playing the long game.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 2:55 PM on February 18, 2015

> The Closest Known Flyby of a Star to the Solar System
> Eric E. Mamajek [et al]

Dang, Eric is really tearing up the joint lately.
posted by kyrademon at 3:03 PM on February 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

Speaking of "A Pail of Air," it's worth listening to the excellent radio drama rendition from the fifties.
posted by sonascope at 3:16 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Whew! That was close. *



* For suitably astronomical values of "close".
posted by Splunge at 3:22 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

52+23-14 kiloAU

You get this sort of error bracket when your observation has a normal distributed error, but it projects non-linearly to a result you're calculating.
posted by localroger at 3:23 PM on February 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

And 70,000 years of smegging Red Dwarf reruns.

Funny story: A few months ago, someone asked me this question on twitter, and I, having had a bad day, was slightly dickish in telling him I didn't know what he was talking about. See, I thought he was asking me because my name looks a little like "smeg" or something. Please understand that this tweet came completely out of nowhere and I had not in any way mentioned red dwarf, that Q&A, that girl or anything remotely related to smeg in years. It took me a good bit of time just to figure out what on earth he was referring to.

Turns out he was asking me because I made this comment 9 years ago, and apparently some search about the use of the word smeg on red dwarf comes up with a link to that same comment.

As you can see from the twitter link, it was that little girl's brother who was looking for the video clip and I was a dick to him about it. Because I'm the worst.
posted by shmegegge at 3:26 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

it's cold outsiiiiiide. there's no kind of atmosphere.
posted by shmegegge at 3:27 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

Thank you for correcting my my 64,935,000 year, error. My Dad used to say,"Some people get all their exercise, jumping to conclusions."
posted by Oyéah at 3:32 PM on February 18, 2015 [4 favorites]

I'm not gonna lie. I was a little disappointed the star was not named for the guitarist from Boston.
posted by jscalzi at 3:41 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

So it came within .945 light years of Sol 70,000 years ago but is now more than 18 light years away a mere 70,000 years later. So we moved past each other at about .001c
posted by humanfont at 3:55 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

Astronomers have discovered that a red dwarf and a brown dwarf

the seven year old inside of me is disappointed that these dwarfs are actually stars.
posted by philip-random at 4:05 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

I bet if a white dwarf walked into the bar, the sun wouldn't call him "boy".
posted by Renoroc at 4:15 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

If we have to go extinct suddenly and catastrophically, I'd rather it be doing something interesting by our own hand.

That's why I endorse CERN building a massive black hole machine just to see if they could, and maybe setting up a couple satellites and Voyager-style deep space probes with golden plaques talking about how cool it was to flip that thing on. It'll take some planning to get the monuments ready after we die, though. But I've skimmed enough Popular Science headlines to know black holes can mess with time, so I'm sure we can fit in some productive work between "create singularity" and "get spaghettified."
posted by mccarty.tim at 4:20 PM on February 18, 2015 [3 favorites]

The Orion-Antaran war was a protracted holocaust of galactic proportions. While we can never know if they truly flung entire star systems across deep space as weapons (as the storytellers claim), our astrophysicists have uncovered evidence of directed energy bursts the power of which staggers the imagination.
posted by damo at 4:29 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

Is... anyone else... singing "Oort Cloud perturber" to the tune of Sade's "Smooth Operator" to their cat right now? No? Um, neither... am I. Sort of.
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:46 PM on February 18, 2015 [22 favorites]

Is that from The Star Beast, damo? If so, way to book 'em.
posted by jamjam at 4:50 PM on February 18, 2015

@jamjam
Master of Orion 2
posted by damo at 5:25 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

So if the bugs from Klendathu were using this red dwarf to fling rocks at Earth they're going to take awhile still to get here.

Well, it takes two to tango. If they're passing through our Oort cloud, then it seems possible we passed through theirs.
posted by pwnguin at 5:56 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

So we moved past each other at about .001c

Which sounds slow, but the equivalent "one million km/h" doesn't.
posted by ROU_Xenophobe at 6:06 PM on February 18, 2015

f they're passing through our Oort cloud, then it seems possible we passed through theirs.

But they are so mind-bogglingly and incomprehensibly alien to us that they spell theirs like "Oert Cloud."
posted by moonmilk at 6:11 PM on February 18, 2015 [9 favorites]

but the equivalent "one million km/h" doesn't.

This is comparable to Sol's orbital velocity about the center of the Milky Way of around 800,000 km/h, but that we encountered Scholz's star at such a relative velocity suggests that it is in a very different galactic orbit than Sol. Red dwarves can have crazy long life spans for stars so Scholz might have a very interesting history. I wonder if they've even tried to plot its galactic orbit?
posted by localroger at 6:26 PM on February 18, 2015 [1 favorite]

> 52+23-14 kiloAU
I've never seen this before; is this sort of notation used for when the error is not symmetric about the estimated value?

Ugh, sorry - yes, localroger above has it right. If you're measuring a parallax (pi), for example, then the distance D = 1/pi, but symmetric measurement errors about pi would translate to different upper and lower uncertainty ranges on D.

More generally, a distance error is always larger on the far side than the near side. As a crude example, if something is at a distance D and you know nothing about the uncertainty, it might be infinitely far away, but it can't be closer than 0, so you can write its distance as D(+infinity,-D).

> It also took a while to parse 'M_o' as 'solar mass', as 'O_o' really pushed me towards "one regular eye, one eyebrow arched really wiggly".

Yeah, sorry about that... The formal LaTeX is $M_\odot$ (and $52^{+23}_{-14}$). Math formatting is hard. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
posted by RedOrGreen at 8:29 PM on February 18, 2015 [2 favorites]

There are 8 known rogue planets. Space must be teeming with them.

"A rogue planet, also known as an interstellar planet, nomad planet, free-floating planet or orphan planet, is a planetary-mass object that orbits the galaxy directly. They have either been ejected from the planetary system in which they formed or never been gravitationally bound to any star or brown dwarf." - Wikipedia
posted by neuron at 9:03 PM on February 18, 2015

The Crucible of Time by John Brunner is really good.

"The novel deals with the efforts of an alien species to escape their homeworld, whose system is passing through a cloud of interstellar debris, resulting in a high rate of in-falling matter. The species' unique biology and their biological technology complicate matters."
posted by neuron at 9:04 PM on February 18, 2015

The Dynamically Important Oort Cloud Perturbers are okay. I like some of their early stuff.


Your favourite band doesn't play local venues anymore.
posted by salishsea at 11:11 PM on February 18, 2015 [6 favorites]

There are 8 known rogue planets. Space must be teeming with them.

...It is further suggested that these planets are likely to remain geologically active for long periods, providing a geodynamo-created protective magnetosphere and possible sea floor volcanism which could provide an energy source for life. Thus humans could theoretically live on a planet without a sun, although food sources would be limited. The author admits these bodies would be difficult to detect due to the intrinsically weak thermal microwave radiation emissions emanating from the lower reaches of the atmosphere, although later research suggests that reflected solar radiation and far-IR thermal emissions may be detectable if one were to pass within 1000 AU of Earth.

1000 AU? That's only .36% of the distance to Alpha Centauri. A spaceship would have to hustle to catch up with it, it would be hella nontrivial, but it would be feasible. If space really is teeming with rogue planets, then we don't have to truck interstellar distances to see earth analogs; we can wait for them to come to us.
posted by Iridic at 8:16 AM on February 19, 2015

>The Dynamically Important Oort Cloud Perturbers are okay. I like some of their early stuff.

Your favourite band doesn't play local venues anymore.


We can go drinking with all the stars
But there's no atmosphere in them outer space bars.

(if anyone actually has that song, I would do almost anything to get an mp3)
posted by charlie don't surf at 10:59 AM on February 19, 2015 [1 favorite]

The Valves, Robot Love?
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:10 AM on February 19, 2015

Yesss! You have made my day. Maybe my week. I used to own this record but I could not recall the band. I have spent many years searching for it, especially the B Side.

For Adolphs Only

Ein zvei drei vier!

Well I got my uniform, I'm OK
I can do the goose step any day
Pick up my guitar, throw away my gun
I'm a 1977 rock n roll Hun

A. D. O. L. F. P. A.
A. D. O. L. F. P. A.
A. D. O. L. F. P. A.
Adolf was a pissed artist, OK!

Sorry this has nothing to do with this thread. But consider that song a warning about what happens when you piss off an artist.
posted by charlie don't surf at 11:51 AM on February 19, 2015