Visiting sun 70,000 yrs ago caused space rocks

[Inquorate]

Hi everyone. I just saw this article, it has the study linked to at the bottom, and I wondered if it could be helpful to anyone.

Wandering star shook up the prehistoric solar system

70,000 years ago, a nomadic star came within a light-year of the Sun, likely sending dozens of comets and asteroids tumbling out of the solar system.

www.astronomy.com

Around 70,000 years ago, a supervolcano named Toba erupted, blowing roughly 670 cubic miles (2,800 cubic kilometers) of vaporized rock and debris into the air. This is thought to have caused a massive struggle for humanity, ultimately leading to a population bottleneck that whittled down our numbers to as few as 1,000 reproductive adults. According to a 2015 study, during this pivotal point in human history, a small reddish star also was likely passing within a light-year of the Sun, just skimming the outer rim of the Oort cloud (the extended shell of over a trillion icy objects that is thought to cocoon the outer solar system).

If this is the wrong spot, pls feel free to move the thread. Could be a good sott article.

 

[Voyageur]

Around 70,000 years ago, a supervolcano named Toba erupted...

Very interesting. This Toba euruption features in this thread The Forgotten Exodus: The Into Africa Theory of Human Evolution and at one point discussion indicated that although bad, things carried on (as seen above the ash layer re tools et cetera) and yet this Scholz’s star passing may have caused other things to happen.

Funny how it is first stated in the article cited how the previous assessments of the star said that Scholz "passed relatively peacefully by the Oort cloud, influencing very few (if any) outer solar system objects." which shifted to it "may have caused more of a ruckus than we initially gave it credit for."

Indeed, I'm sure it did.

In the study, published February 6 in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society: Letters, researchers analyzed the orbital evolution of 339 known minor objects (like asteroids and comets) with hyperbolic orbits that will eventually usher them out of the solar system. By running full N-body simulations with these objects in reverse for 100,000 years, the team was able to accurately estimate the point in the sky where each body appears to have come from.

Surprisingly, the team found that over 10 percent of the objects (36) originated from the direction of the constellation Gemini. This spot in the sky also happens to be exactly where astronomers would expect objects to come from if they were nudged by Scholz’s star during its close pass 70,000 years ago.
[...]
In addition to finding evidence that Scholz’s star had an ancient interaction with the Oort cloud, the team also determined that eight of the objects they studied (including the recent interstellar visitor ‘Oumuamua) are traveling so quickly that they likely originated from outside the solar system. Furthermore, these eight objects all have radiants that are relatively well separated from the others, which suggests their orbital paths are unique and uncorrelated. Two of these objects, C/2012 SI (ISON) and C/2008 J4 (McNaught), have extreme velocities of around 9,000 miles (14,500 km) per hour, which strongly indicates they are interstellar objects zipping through our solar system

In the original 2015 article (A close call of 0.8 light-years) it says:

Currently, Scholz’s star is a small dim red dwarf in the constellation Monoceros, about 20 light-years away. However, at the closest point in its flyby of the solar system, Scholz’s star would have been a 10th-magnitude star — about 50 times fainter than can normally be seen with the naked eye at night. It is magnetically active, however, which can cause stars to “flare” and briefly become thousands of times brighter. So it is possible that Scholz’s star may have been visible to the naked eye by our ancestors 70,000 years ago for minutes or hours at a time during rare flaring events.

The star is part of a binary star system: a low-mass red dwarf star with mass about 8 percent that of the Sun and a “brown dwarf” companion with mass about 6 percent that of the Sun. Brown dwarfs are considered “failed stars”; their masses are too low to fuse hydrogen in their cores like a star, but they are still much more massive than gas giant planets like Jupiter.

Good find, Inquorate.

 

[Chad]

If this is the wrong spot, pls feel free to move the thread. Could be a good sott article.

Just for reference, it's already up and from Phys.org: Scholz's star disturbed prehistory solar system comets -- Sott.net