Roaming star system a near miss!

[Archean]

Roaming star system a near miss!


Artist’s depiction of Scholz’s star, a binary star, during its flyby of our solar system. At this location – in the outer Oort cloud cloud – the sun (left, background) would have appeared as a brilliant star. Image via Michael Osadciw/University of Rochester.

Astronomers announced this week – February 16, 2015 – that they’ve now identified the closest known flyby of a star, really two stars, to our solar system. The culprit is a binary system consisting of a low-mass red dwarf star (with a mass about 8% that of our sun) and a brown dwarf companion (with a mass about 6% that of the sun). This pair passed through our solar system’s outer Oort comet cloud some 70,000 years ago. No other star is known to have ever approached our solar system this close – five times closer than the current closest star, Proxima Centauri.