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Our solar organization has only the one star, merely astronomers now have good reason to think a second star paid us a visit about 70,000 years ago. That's when Scholz'due south Star is believed to have skimmed the border of our solar system on its mode out to deep interstellar space. Scholz's Star is a small red dwarf, but it may have passed so close by that our early homo ancestors could have seen it when they looked upwardly at the heaven.

Scholz'south Star is actually a low-mass binary system consisting of a ruby-red dwarf and a brown dwarf. Red dwarfs are the most common type of star in the universe, and chocolate-brown dwarfs are one step beneath that. They're sometimes chosen "failed stars" because they don't accept enough mass to fuse hydrogen and go a "real star." They tin probably fuse another elements, so yous can remember of them as very large, warm Jupiters. Our first hint that Scholz'south Star buzzed the solar system came in 2022 when a team of astronomers calculated its path. This binary pair is zipping through space rather fast, and the analysis projected a path through the edge of our solar system.

A new study from researchers at the Complutense University of Madrid has found more prove to support a visit by Scholz's Star. A team led by Carlos de la Fuente Marcos analyzed 339 objects in the outer solar arrangement known to accept hyperbolic orbits — that means they have 5-shaped paths instead of circular or elliptical ones. These objects could theoretically be captured from interstellar space, merely they could also be native to the solar organisation (likely from the Oort Cloud, a cocoon of comets around the solar organisation). A passing star could take nudged them into unusual orbits, and that'southward what the researchers were trying to find out.

You'd expect objects with hyperbolic orbits in the outer solar organisation to be randomly distributed, but that'due south not the case. There is a "statistically significant" concentration of such objects in the direction of the constellation of Gemini. That fits with the proposed path of Scholz's Star 70,000 years ago.

Scholz's Star is currently between 17 and 23 light years away. At its closest approach, it may have been merely i light year away from the sunday. Currently, Proxima Centauri is our closest celestial neighbour at iv.5 light years distant. Early on humans living at the time would have seen a faint ruby-red spot in the heaven. It'due south possible Scholz's Star could have knocked comets out of the Oort Cloud every bit it passed, and those objects could pose a danger to the inner solar system. It'll accept about 2 million years for those objects to achieve united states of america, though.