A red dwarf and its brown dwarf companion buzzed through the outer Oort Cloud some 70,000 years ago, around the time when modern humans began migrating from Africa into Eurasia.

An artist's conception of Scholz's star. The Sun can be seen as a bright background star to the left. Michael Osadciw / University of Rochester.
An artist's conception of Scholz's star. The Sun can be seen as a bright background star to the left.
Michael Osadciw / University of Rochester.

Most of space is empty. So in a galaxy bustling with hundreds of billions of stars, there’s too high a separation between them for any physical run-ins. Even close encounters are few and far between.

But studies of a nearby, low-mass star hiding among the confusion of the galaxy’s disk shows that space might be a little less empty than previously thought.

A year ago, astronomer Eric Mamajek (University of Rochester) heard about a faint star, while chatting with his colleague. This star, nicknamed Scholz’s star, sparked his interest: it was close — only 20 light-years away — yet its proper motion was surprisingly slow, meaning that it inched sluggishly across the sky.

The latter doesn’t mean that the star isn’t moving, but that much of its movement is hidden in its radial velocity, the motion along our line of sight and into the plane of the sky. It became clear that the star had recently passed close to the Solar System and was now moving rapidly away.

Putting the star’s approximate distance and velocity into a “toy code,” Mamajek had a rough answer within 20 minutes: the star had almost certainly sped near the Sun tens of thousands of years ago.

To calculate the star’s trajectory more precisely, and to see just how close it had come, Mamajek needed data on the star’s current position and its motion, both along and into the plane of the sky. A team led by Adam Burgasser (University of California, San Diego) gathered the necessary data.

The star’s proper motion along the plane of the sky can only be measured by waiting long enough for the star to change its position appreciably. Luckily, images as far back as a photographic plate from 1955 had serendipitously captured the star. Between 1955 and 2014, the star had moved roughly 6 arcseconds. (For comparison, your little finger held up to the sky at arm's length covers a full degree, or 3600 arcseconds.)

Burgasser’s team measured the star’s parallax — that tiny back-and-forth motion we see as Earth moves from one end of its orbit to the other — to give the star’s current distance. And spectroscopy showed the slight Doppler shift in the star’s spectral lines as it moves away from us, providing the star’s radial velocity.

Most surprisingly, Burgasser’s team showed that Scholz’s star, a red M-class star, actually has a smaller brown dwarf companion.

With all the pieces of the puzzle, Mamajek and his colleagues were able to trace all the possible paths Scholz’s star may have taken. The team simulated 10,000 orbits for the star to take into account the uncertainties in the star’s position, distance and velocity, as well as the effect of Milky Way’s gravitational field.

Of all those simulations, 98 percent show that the star had passed through the outer Oort Cloud. Its closest approach was probably between 0.6 and 1.2 light-years away, when it scraped the Oort Cloud 70,000 years ago at 83 kilometers per second.

Until now, the top candidate for the closest flyby had been the so-called “rogue star” HIP 85605, discovered by Coryn Bailer-Jones (Max Planck Institute of Astronomy) in a study that analyzed the trajectories of 50,000 nearby stars. That star was predicted to pass 0.13 to 0.65 light-years from our Sun in 240,000 to 470,000 years.

Bailer-Jones, however, noted that the original distance to HIP 85605 was highly uncertain. So Mamajek and his colleagues determined a more likely distance and its newly calculated trajectory doesn't bring it within the Oort Cloud at all.

Although Bailer-Jones agrees with the team’s assessment of the rogue star, he also warns that even though Scholz’s star currently holds the record, it doesn’t hold it by much. A second star, known as Gliese 710, has a more precisely calculated trajectory that shows it flying by almost as close as Scholz’s star. Both close approaches come within each other’s uncertainties.

Nonetheless, the discovery of another close-pass star proves an interesting point. “This is by no means a statistical survey,” says Mamajek. But, he continues, it’s an example of what are likely many more undiscovered nearby stars, whose trajectories might bring them close to the Sun.

The European Space Agency recently launched the Gaia satellite to map out the distances and velocities of billions of stars, bringing low mass stars into focus.

Close encounters could perturb comets in the Oort cloud, shaking them up and sending them our way. “But there is no need to worry,” says coauthor Henri Boffin (European Space Observatory). “Even if the Oort cloud was perturbed, it takes millions of years for a comet in the cloud to reach the Earth.”

Reference:

Adam Burgasser et al. " WISE J072003.20-084651.2: An Old and Active M9.5 + T5 Spectral Binary 6 pc from the Sun." Astrophysical Journal. February 19, 2015.

Eric Mamajek et al. “The Closest Known Flyby of a Star to the Solar System.” Astrophysical Journal Letters. February 12, 2015.

Comments


Image of Tom Hoffelder

Tom Hoffelder

February 23, 2015 at 8:52 pm

I know you know that one degree is 60 arcminutes, not 60 arcseconds. That means the star moved 1/600th the width (someone new to the subject might think you meant length) of your little finger, not 1/10th. And your little finger's width covers one degree when it is held at arms length (again, the new person might think reading distance), which means it then covers twice the moon's diameter.

Other than that, very good article.

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Monica Young

February 24, 2015 at 10:34 am

Thanks for the catch, rocksnstars! We've corrected the article.

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February 23, 2015 at 10:48 pm

So how would that binary have appeared to residents of Earth at closest approach?

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Peter Wilson

February 24, 2015 at 11:26 am

A dim red star.

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Anthony Barreiro

February 24, 2015 at 2:00 pm

The wikipedia article on Scholz's star links to this very informative FAQ by Mamajek et al.

http://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/flyby.html

From the FAQ:

<<>>

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Anthony Barreiro

February 24, 2015 at 2:01 pm

S&T apparently didn't like my quotation marks. Here's the excerpt from the FAQ:

How bright was Scholz's star at its closest? Was it visible to the naked eye? How intrinsically bright/luminous/massive would it have had to have been to be visible to the naked eye?

Scholz's star is currently V = 18.3 magnitude at distance 6.0 parsecs, so it has absolute V magnitude of Mv = 19.4. At its closest distance of 0.25 parsecs (52,000 AU) it would have been at magnitude V = 11.4 (there is a typo in Sec. 4 of the paper - the predicted V magnitude should be 11.4, not 10.3). This is roughly 5 magnitudes (factor of 100x) fainter than the faintest naked eye stars. As we mention in the paper, Scholz's star is a magnetically active M9.5 star - similar stars have been seen to flare by more than 9 magnitudes (Schmidt et al. 2014), so it possible that Scholz's star may have occasionally been a naked eye object for minutes or hours during rare bright flare events.

At distance 0.25 pc (52,000 AU), for a star to be naked eye with V magnitude brighter than 6, a star would have to have absolute V magnitude brighter than Mv ~ 14, roughly corresponding to a main sequence star of M5 type or hotter (~15% the mass of the Sun).

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rick

February 27, 2015 at 6:39 pm

"This is roughly 5 magnitudes (factor of 100x) fainter than the faintest naked eye stars - See more at: http://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/stars-closest-flyby-sun/#sthash.RohXp5go.dpuf"

Wouldn't 5 magnitudes be a factor of 50x (vs. 100x)?

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Anthony Barreiro

March 2, 2015 at 1:53 pm

The magnitude scale is logarithmic. By definition a difference of 5 magnitudes is equal to a difference of 100. A second magnitude star is 2.512 times fainter than and first magnitude star; a third magnitude star is 2.512 times fainter than a second magnitude star, etc.

The wikipedia article on apparent magnitude is helpful.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude

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Anthony Barreiro

March 2, 2015 at 1:54 pm

The magnitude scale is logarithmic. By definition a difference of 5 magnitudes is equal to a brightness difference of 100 times. A second magnitude star is 2.512 times fainter than and first magnitude star; a third magnitude star is 2.512 times fainter than a second magnitude star, etc.
The wikipedia article on apparent magnitude is helpful.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent_magnitude
- See more at: http://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-news/stars-closest-flyby-sun/#comment-104210

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David-Smith

February 24, 2015 at 7:35 pm

And what of the Oort cloud around Scholz's star? How for into the Solar system did it penetrate?

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