About 70,000 twelvemonth ago , a red dwarf star came within one light - year of our Solar System . And it turns out we canstill seesome of the results of that close handing over .
Called Scholz ’s star , it passed less than a light - yr from our Sun , the closest passageway of a champion we live about . This was nigh enough to disturb the Oort Cloud , a huge mass of trillions of comets that surrounds our Solar System out to about several low-cal - age .
And a team of astronomers from the Complutense University of Madrid and the University of Cambridge have find piles of comets in our Solar System that appear to have been disturbed by this lead . Their findings are publish in the journalMonthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society : letter of the alphabet .
These comet are in quintuplet - mold hyperbolic orbits , with their track stretch far out of the Solar System before swing in again . Studying the known orbits of these objects , of which there were 339 in aggregate , the team crop out that 36 seem to have been affected by the passing wiz .
" Some of them seem to be come from the same region in the sky ( an area on Gemini ) that come along to have been crossed by the Scholz ’s star nearly 70,000 eld ago , " Carlos de la Fuente Marcos from Complutense University , the study ’s lead writer , secernate IFLScience .
The star has just 9 percent of the Sun ’s people , and is now located about 20 lightheaded - long time from our Solar System . But that ’s still a nice sizing , and its close propinquity think of it send our Oort Cloud haywire . It ’s even possible that our upstage ancestors control its weak reddish Light Within in the night sky .
Backin 2015researchers first discovered that Scholz ’s star , which is thought to actually be part of a binary system , pass away our Solar System . It ’s of import to see the impact it had , not least because we think another superstar – Gliese 710 – may guide quite nigh in about 1.35 million years .
Interestingly , there ’s another significant determination hidden in this modish study . The researchers also said that they had recover evidence for eight comets that could be interstellar objects , one of which – C/1999 U2 – is still in the Solar System today . It ’s tough to make love for sure as we have n’t seen it again since 2005 , although it ’s possible that another body ( C/2005 W5 ) is the same target .
You may think back ‘ Oumuamua , the firstinterstellar visitorever see to it in our Solar System , was spotted last twelvemonth . But stargazer have thought there could be more , and this subject area appears to evoke that ’s the case .
“ Interstellar intruder could be the result of the gravitational slingshot essence , ” the researchers note in their paper . “ The prospect of detecting these body has been take for 10 . ”
