'Rogue' star won't collide with our solar system in 29,000 years after all

[Admin]

A runaway dead star predicted to have a close encounter with our solar system in tens of thousands of years will actually miss our neck of the cosmic woods.

'Rogue' star won't collide with our solar system in 29,000 years after all : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

The article has the "scrunched" and "stretched" aspects of light wavelength shifting stated backwards.

"If a star is moving away us, that scrunches up wavelengths, which has the effect of shifting the light down to the red end of the electromagnetic spectrum, a phenomenon known as redshift. If a star is moving toward us, however, the wavelength of light it emits is stretched and moves toward the blue end and is described as being 'blueshifted."'

 

[Helio]

Yep, surprising that wasn't caught.

But, using the original radial velocity, it would be arriving in 29 years, as originally claimed, but not come any closer than about 2-1/2 lyrs., not what was claimed.

What may have gotten notice was that the original velocity was stated as -373.74 kps (Wiki still shows this). But this is about 10x any normal speed, so a real speedster.

The new result (paper here) changes it to +83 kps (moving away from us) but the large margin of error is 149 kps, which would allow a chance that it is coming our way.

Assuming the difference, highly unlikely admittedly, then, using -57 kps, it wouldn't get any closer than about 15 lyrs. to us and take 158k years to do so.