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Passing stars changed the orbits of planets in the solar system
- marsissippi 3y agoGreat short article. Takeaway: because of ancient star flybys "the uncertainties of Earth’s past orbit make it difficult to be confident more than 50 million years. And that has a significant impact on paleoclimate studies."
- jvanderbot 3y agoThat's actually fascinating! Among other things passing stars can do, I imagine, is knock comets out of the Ort cloud? So speaking of dinosaurs...
- hinkley 3y agoThe butterfly effect, where the 'butterfly' is a stellar object.
- marsissippi 3y agoLisa Randall's book "Dark Matter and the Dinosaurs" has that vibe (not about passing stars, but about the solar system passing through an area of the galaxy thick with dark matter - but the imagined impact is the same).
- vardump 3y agoMaybe dinosaurs jumped to another star that time and arranged some fireworks to ensure no one will follow?
- collaborative 3y agoI often think about how stars come within 1 light year of our Sun every 300,000 years. It's pretty wild. And then I have to worry about rogue planets, meteorites, and obfuscated stars going supernova. What are the odds we're here?
- pfdietz 3y agoThis also means very long lived extraterrestrial civilizations can colonize the galaxy with slow very short range starships. Just wait for stars to come within a fraction of a light year and send over ships at 1% of the speed of light (or even slower). The star will move away, and it also becomes a target for close approaches of stars. The number of colonized stars grows exponentially (if gradually) until most stars have been colonized.
- alserio 3y agoSorry, I'm not getting this. The star will move away from what? Wouldn't the spaceship move with the star? I apologize if I'm misinterpreting what you said
- 0cf8612b2e1e 3y agoI think they mean that if you start in solar system A, when solar system B flies by, you enter its gravity and colonize the system. Eventually solar system B will fly by solar system C, where you can repeat the process.
- dboreham 3y agoB-Arc
- mtlmtlmtlmtl 3y agoOnce you've colonised the star system during its close passage to your own, it will continue its journey and eventually pass nearby other star systems, which can then be colonised as well. So every colony will spawn more colonies, leading to exponential growth. At least I think that's what they meant. It's an interesting idea for sure.
- pfdietz 3y agoYes, that's exactly what I meant.
- LASR 3y agoIn university I coded an N-body simulator and visualizer. This was back before when we had so many games that exist now. It taught me a lot about orbital mechanics. One realization I had was how orbits were fragile and how easily you could shift them with influence from very far away. Another realization- gravity is weak, but it decreases over a huge distance compared to other forces we normally experience in human scale.
- jvanderbot 3y agoDoes gravity decrease more slowly than other forces, or is it so weak that the gravity sources we feel are enormous and therefore have long radii of non-negligible effect, or is it something else?
- o11c 3y agoGravity doesn't cancel like the electromagnetic force, despite otherwise decreasing at the same rate. I've never heard an explanation of the strong or weak forces that I actually "get" enough to understand their distance effects.
- mikeInAlaska 3y ago>I've never heard an explanation of the strong > or weak forces that I actually "get" I thought this was excellent (in all ways) but particularly for your question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYW1lKNVI90 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UYW1lKNVI90
- o11c 3y agoIn case anyone else wants to watch: the weak force isn't mentioned until just after the 45-minute mark. I haven't got to the strong force yet but it presumably follows. Edit: so for weak, I think I understand that "photons are massless, so are only subject to the inverse-square law; weak bosons have mass, so are also subject to decay". But that doesn't explain to this dummy how the strong force works, since gluons are also massless (... though mesons are not? but they're not fundamental).
- mianos 3y agoThe title is wrong. "Passing Stars Could, and Maybe Have, Changed the Orbits of Planets in the Solar System'. I guess they are going by the old journalist's adage, never let the facts get in the way of a good story. The paper, linked, https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad24fb https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ad24fb, does go into the chaotic behavior and why it's all kinda sorta made up.
- NotSammyHagar 3y agoThe other rule of journalism is the author of of a piece doesn't write the headline.
- adaml_623 3y agoOne day sub-editors will be named and shamed for the headlines they excrete onto the world
- NotSammyHagar 3y agoAnd will be replaced by chatgpt written headlines that are focused on attracting attention even more flagrantly than today. Today even in 'real newspapers' online you see headlines like "The way to tell if your financial advisor is good is..."
- vikingerik 3y agoWell, in the "technically correct" department, the stars all do, even if it's on the order of attometers or whatever. It's set up to pass the fact-checking, so yeah, that's just about the standards of modern journalism.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- jacquesm 3y agoI'm sick and tired of the more or less concerted attack on journalists with every opportunity. Bad media have been around as long as there have been media, if you think the standards of modern journalism have dropped you are either looking at things through a very local lens or simply not well informed about mass media through the ages. But quality content exists if you're willing to pay for it, which is how it has always been. Free content, whether in print or on the web can be very good but as a rule if it is brought to you by a commercial entity you have to always question the value of the words and their relation to commercial interests.
- daxfohl 3y agoThe picture is misleading. Scholz's star is a dwarf and was not visible by the naked eye even at closest approach, unless it happened to flare at the time (and even then would have been like the thousandth brightest object in the sky). https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/flyby.html https://www.pas.rochester.edu/~emamajek/flyby.html
- jandrewrogers 3y agoAs an interesting related tangent, one of the largest asteroids in the solar system, Juno (~250km diameter), changed its orbit in the 19th century and there is no evidence what caused it.
- pif 3y agoTalks about an event several dozens of million years ago. Shows a picture of a hominid looking at a star. Keep up the good work!
- lupusreal 3y agoI wish they'd put that "little detail" prominently in the title. Without it, this becomes fodder for people who believe in astrology. Maybe this was the idea...
- ctchocula 3y agoIf you're interested in this topic, you might also be interested in the idea that there is a Brown Dwarf hidden near our solar system that causes periodic extinctions on Earth, because it periodically messes up the comet shield provided by the Sun and gas giants. [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nemesis_(hypothetical_star)