3 ms·
This reminds me of the story "A Pail of Air" [0] where a "dark star" passes through the inner solar system, and its gravity causes the Earth to be ejected from
by ufmace 12y ago
This reminds me of the story "A Pail of Air" [0] where a "dark star" passes through the inner solar system, and its gravity causes the Earth to be ejected from the Sun's orbit. The story features a family who can only survive by maintaining a fire and constantly fetching pails of frozen Oxygen to heat up to breathe and pressurize their living area.
I thought of it as one of those things that's extremely unlikely to happen, but we'd be screwed if it did.
A little surprising that other start passing through the outer Oort cloud might actually happen semi-regularly, on galactic timescales. Makes the idea sound a little less unlikely, though the inner Solar System seems to have been around for ~5 billion years, and hasn't been disrupted by any star-mass galactic bodies yet.
[0] http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___6.htm http://www.baenebooks.com/chapters/0743498747/0743498747___6...
- yongjik 12y agoNote that a distant star's ability to "perturb" the inner solar system is basically tidal force: it's the difference in how much the star attracts the Earth vs. the Sun, because if they are pulled by exactly the same acceleration then nothing is changed from the Earth and Sun's viewpoint. So, the effect is proportional to 1/(distance)^3. I guess anything that zips around at ~10,000 AU would basically have zero effect on the inner solar system. And if we reduce the expected distance, the "target area" gets incredibly small. I think we're safe for the time being. :)