What effect would the passage of a wandering star have in the vicinity of the Solar System? A team of scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Astronomy in Heilderberg (Germany) has calculated the possible consequences for Earth. The study has been published on arXiv.org , an online repository of Cornell University (USA) for pre-publications of scientific articles in the fields of mathematics, physics, computer science or quantitative biology.
The conclusions of the study are not very positive for the inhabitants of the Earth since, according to their calculations, the passage of this star could destabilize the delicate balance of the Oort Cloud, which would lead to a veritable shower of comets against our planet . Our Solar System is full of millions of frozen rocks of greater or lesser size and as we know, many of the comets that we observe, both we and astronomers, come from the Oort Cloud. A star that passes too close could bombard thousands of these rocks directly toward Earth.
To reach this conclusion, the experts, led by astronomer Coryn Bailer-Jones, accurately reproduced the past and future movements of 50,000 stars (with data taken from ESA’s Hipparcos mission). The investigation revealed that 14 stars will pass within 3.26 light years of us .
Fortunately, this event will not happen imminently , but will happen sometime within the next quarter million years. What stars would threaten this balance? At the moment, the closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf located just 4 light years away. Another of them would be Hio 85605, with a 90% probability of passing almost touching us (between 0.13 and 0.65 light years).
“I think we can predict with certainty that the orbits of comets will be disturbed by these encounters,” says Bailer-Jones. In any case, as all stars are in constant motion, it can not be ruled out that some other stars will be much closer to us in the future.
