Talk:Scholz's Star

Warning: Discuss Scholz's star in relation to ancient astronaut theory in a different article
If this star is important for a potential ancient astronaut theory, it should be discussed in an article about ancient astronaut theory, not the other way around.

However, discussion of possible perturbations caused by it traveling through the Oort cloud and how it could have impacted a fledgling cro magnon man and neanderthal in the most mundane sense is probably worth discussing. Anything that could have flung a lot of space junk our way is worth discussing.

Protect this article against ancient astronauts kooks
The speed this star is travelling, which comes to 1 light year per 3645 Earth Years, is coincidentally nearly identical to the 3600 year orbital period that the Planet Nibiru nutters say that the homeworld of the ancient Sumerian Gods, the Annunaki, came from. They will likely jump on this article as "proof" of their theories and say the sumerians did not understand the light year as a unit of distance rather than time and assumed the 3600 time span was the gods homeworld orbital period not its own stars speed through the heavens.... For this reason I recommend that an admin protect this article. 75.67.85.217 (talk) 22:43, 17 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, and they could be right, but it's not the job of an encyclopedia to mediate that. I think it'd make sense for there to be mention of this in an article about ancient astronaut theory, not the other way around. 162.237.228.60 (talk) 22:38, 21 January 2016 (UTC)


 * I'll be watching it, but protecting it right now is neither necessary nor productive, as various editors are improving it currently. Jonathunder (talk) 22:46, 17 February 2015 (UTC)


 * WISE 0720-0846 does NOT orbit the Sun and was NOT near the Sun 3600 years ago. It probably would NOT have been visible to the naked eye during any DG Canum Venaticorum style outbursts even when near closest approach to the Sun. During a major outburst, it would have visually only brightened by about 10 times and would have gone from apparent magnitude 10.3 to about apparent magnitude 7.8 (roughly the brightest planet Neptune ever gets). -- Kheider (talk) 23:07, 17 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Well, if a lot of space junk is being flung at Earth (obviously missing Earth for the most part but visible as comets) then the source can be traced. We assume that people 70,000 years ago didn't have advanced mathematics but maybe some of them did. There's been other forgotten arts in the past. I am not saying that it should be in this article. Instead such discussions would be for an article on ancient astronaut theory. I'm just saying that it isn't completely impossible it's right. Short of finding a 70,000 year old tablet somewhere, I just don't think it's a scientific discussion for now 162.237.228.60 (talk)

Second paragraph
The two sentences about the difference in Astronomical units in which it talks about closeness to the solar system and the oort cloud needs to be explained for a public reader. As someone with sufficient, but not an extreme, education in Astronomy to read most of our featured articles in the field, this is very muddling for me. Sadads (talk) 00:34, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

"evidence to the contrary seems to be a coincidence"
Hey, this wording is a simple gloss from the language in the source (PDF):


 * The predicted Galactic coordinates of the nearest
 * pass of the binary system (`, b = 135◦ ± 15◦, 47◦ ± 13◦)
 * is near one of the two strong peaks in the longitude
 * of aphelia distribution of new class I comets from the
 * Oort Cloud (` = 135◦ ± 15◦) (Matese et al. 1999).
 * However this appears to be coincidence, as any comets
 * on eccentricity ∼ 1 orbits from the vicinity of the
 * nearest pass ∼70 kya would have periods of ∼4 Myr,
 * and hence require ∼2 Myr to reach the inner solar
 * system.

Have I misrepresented (or perhaps oversimplified) what it says? "Appears to be" seems like a hedge to me. -- Kendrick7talk 03:09, 18 October 2015 (UTC)


 * Thank you for quoting the section you are referring to. That section does go on to explain that the peaks in longitude distribution can be explained by the Galactic tide. It seems a little strong to call the potential peaks any kind of evidence that Scholz's passage was/is involved. Any peak could also be a result of a different object that passed through the Oort cloud millions of years ago. Comets such as C/2002 J4 with aphelion 60,000AU from the Sun take ~5 million years to orbit the Sun. Such a comet would still take half that time to travel aphelion to perihelion. Any notable increase in comets should still be millions of years after a passage of a red dwarf 50,000+AU from the Sun. -- Kheider (talk) 13:04, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
 * I can't lie about being just an amatuer here,, but don't class I comets have a period of just a few hundred years? And weren't we able to slingshot Voyager I via Jupiter/Saturn out towards the Oort cloud which it will reach in a mere fraction of a million years, even though both have but a fraction of the mass as would be involved in both this binary system and the postulated mass of a typical Oort cloud object? (Putting aside whether or not Mamajek et al. even takes into account whether the passing star system has or had icy objects of its own; and possible evidence that a comet may have smacked really hard into Earth around this same time.) Under what circumstances would you hold Matese et alia to be valid? My instinct is that this doesn't quite add up, and I still don't think the source is as definitive as we're lending it credence per the current wording. -- Kendrick7talk 02:43, 20 October 2015 (UTC)
 * The Matese1999 paper is somewhat dubious because of the fairly small sample size, and they were talking about a BOUND perturber. They were talking about Oort cloud comets, not Short-period comets. Any red dwarf passing through the Oort Cloud would on average be passing thousands of AU from the comets that it is perturbing, thus the perturbations are more of a nudge than a Nolan Ryan pitch. Bottom line is their is no evidence that Scholz's star is responsible for any known comets as such comets would have to have an eccentricity much greater than 1 to get from ~50000+AU so fast. Voyager I has an eccentricity of 3.7. Your Toba catastrophe theory comment is pure SYNTH as objects frequently impact Earth from the asteroid belt. -- Kheider (talk) 05:59, 20 October 2015 (UTC)

Error bars
A quick BOTE indicates an error in time of plus or minus 7253.55 years (~10%) in keeping with the very poor parallax determination. The assertion of 70,000 years should be amended to indicate that this is a very provisional figure. IMHO. In addition other close dim stars have been frequently found to be brighter and much further away. Brobof (talk) 14:06, 8 December 2015 (UTC)


 * The approach distance is more notable and the time uncertainty is closer to 15000 years. But I think we should prevent cluttering the entire article with uncertainties. We already say, "about 70,000 years ago". -- Kheider (talk) 14:33, 8 December 2015 (UTC)


 * I reworded a bit to give some idea of the margin of error. Feel free to revise. It occurs to me that when we are talking about a stellar system passing through the Oort cloud, both are large areas, not points. How is that reflected in the estimates? Jonathunder (talk) 16:48, 8 December 2015 (UTC)

17 - 23 light years
Quite a range of positions. This tells me that before reading the rest of the article that we don't know where it is, how fast it's going, or where it's been and when it's been there. The rest of the stuff is moot nonsense.Ealtram (talk) 08:58, 21 March 2018 (UTC)
 * According to the parallax estimation, the star is 19.6 +/- 3.4 light years away, but that's a very specific method of distance estimation. If you use, for instance, its spectroscopic distance, it's a much better-defined 21 +/- 1 light years away. Fortunately, a lot of these estimations are independent of each other. Regardless of if the star is 20 or 200 light years away, we know for sure that it's moving away from us at 83.1 kilometers per second based on the redshift. In fact, with the distance error, the total uncertainty in its approach (based on the parallax) as I calculate now is $0.821$ light years, and with the spectroscopic parallax, $0.941$ light years. exoplanetaryscience (talk) 22:15, 4 May 2018 (UTC)

Requested move 4 May 2018

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: consensus to move the page at this time, per the discussion below. Dekimasu よ! 02:33, 11 May 2018 (UTC)

Scholz's star → Scholz's Star – Along with Teegarden's star, this star should be entirely capitalized as it is its proper name. See discussion on Teegarden's Star as well. exoplanetaryscience (talk) 22:02, 4 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Agree. Barnard's Star, which is a featured article, is upper case. Jonathunder (talk) 04:01, 5 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Agreed, and I would go further to say that you can simply make all such moves as uncontroversial (or request uncontroversial admin moves where the destination uppercase entry already exists as a redirect). --pmj (talk) 03:09, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Support per above nom and comments. Randy Kryn (talk) 13:05, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
 * Support. Indeed. Proper names. -- Necrothesp (talk) 13:33, 9 May 2018 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

Possible influence on Planet Nine's orbit?
A few recent reports linking this stellar passby to origin of Planet Nine's far out orbit: J mareeswaran (talk) 11:04, 6 March 2019 (UTC)
 * 70,000 years ago, Scholz’s Star passed within 0.82 light years of the Sun. This may explain the orbits of certain small objects in the solar system. They appear to have originated from an area of space that corresponds with the area Scholz’s Star would’ve disrupted as it moved past our own system
 * Planet Nine is still connected to our sun. The only way to detach it from repeated encounters with Jupiter is for some external force to give it an extra kick to move it farther away from the sun.” That kick would need to come from another massive object – like a passing star. And astronomers have even found evidence of stars that passed through the outer edge of our system, like Scholz’s star, which swung by about 70,000 years ago

Pronunciation
Do people pronounce this as if it were "Shoals's Star", per the pronunciation of the surname 'Sholz' in N.America, or as "Shoal-ts's Star" or "Shawl-ts's Star" as an approximation of the German? — kwami (talk) 05:02, 28 April 2019 (UTC)

Ralf Scholz got back to me and said 'The American pronunciation of my name Scholz as "shoals" is fine with me', so I'm going with that. — kwami (talk) 16:05, 13 May 2019 (UTC)

Units when discussing flybys
> In a recent estimate, WISE J0720−0846AB passed within 68.7 ± 2.0 kAU of the Sun 80.5 ± 0.7 kyr ago.[3]

> In about 1.4 million years, Gliese 710 will come to a perihelion of between 8,800 and 13,700 AU.

The use of kAU in the first paragraph and AU in the second makes it more difficult to compare. Is there a reason not to use the same units for both paragraphs? 212.51.137.106 (talk) 08:02, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Contradictory statistics
Existing text says: "Estimates indicate that the WISE 0720−0846 system passed about 52,000 astronomical units (0.25 parsecs; 0.82 light-years) from the Sun about 70,000 years ago.[2][6][9] Ninety-eight percent of mathematical simulations of the star system's trajectory indicated that it passed through the Solar System's Oort cloud, or within 120,000 AU (0.58 pc; 1.9 ly) of the Sun.[2]"

Isn't there a large contradiction there? How close was this star to our sun: .82 light years or 1.9 light years? Both distances are given and both are presented as fact. Some clarificatory language seems to be indicated. "Some estimates indicate that....but 98 percent of mathematical......" etc. I would add this myself but a more informed editor may have a different notion. Smallchief (talk) 12:15, 9 December 2022 (UTC)
 * $0.25 pc$ is less than $0.58 pc$, so I don't see any contradiction. Estimates vary, the mean/median/best is $0.25 pc$ and only 2% are more than $0.58 pc$.  Lithopsian (talk) 19:50, 9 December 2022 (UTC)