I know... can you imagine what that must have looked like?
Am I reading tis article correctly? This thing blew through our solar system 70K years ago?
Not much to be honest - it's a very faint star. Even at that type of close approach, it wouldn't have been visible to the naked eye.
Am I reading tis article correctly? This thing blew through our solar system 70K years ago?
By some definitions, the outer solar system, yes - but not really the solar system as we commonly think of it. We'd still be looking at this star being somewhere around 1000 times as far from the sun as Pluto.
I would say that ‘blew past’ is more descriptive.
One light year = 5.8 TRILLION MILES
One light year = 63241 AU’s
This thing allegedly came within .8 light year.
That is a little over 50,000 times the distance from the Sun to the Earth.
Well, “through our solar system” was some 0.8 light-years from the Sun. That’s pretty far, and it was a pretty small star. Enough to cause some disruptions, but not tear everything apart.