What happens to Earth if MW becomes a quasar?

[ToyOne]

Star set to collide with solar system
"New calculations show that the orange dwarf, called Gliese 710, will crash through the Oort Cloud....
Some believe it could lead to a repeat of the Late Heavy Bombardment....
The threat from Gliese 710, a star with about half the mass of the sun... is rated as 86 per cent likely. That is nearly as good as a certainty."

I wouldn't put too much stock in this story. First they say in "a million years", then they say "a million and a half years." They also said they surveyed 1000,000 stars, which isn't even a number. Finally, I didn't think a there was such a thing as a "brown dwarf star". I thought a brown dwarf was a failed star.

With editing THAT bad, I wouldn't trust anything they say!

 

[satthralope]

Scientific American has a poor track record. If this story came from Nature, I would be much more convinced.

 

[Boris_Badenov]

Much more likely that Earth would be destroyed by a shockwave or GSB from within our own galaxy before then.

What's a GSB?

Edit; Gas Sucking Behemoth?

 

[DartmanX]

Simple answer: the quasar would win.

 

[StarRider1701]

When I saw the title:
I read it as
What happens if Meteor Wayne becomes a Quasar?

I too read it that way too and had to look! Ya gotta admit, its a scary thought! :shock: :lol:

First you start out worrying about something that will happen anywhere from 2 to 5 Billion years from now. Someone points out that the Sun will fry the Earth in only 1 Billion years. Then y'all start arguing over something that may or may not happen a mere Million years from now. And the funny part is you all are talking as if these are all impending doomsdays that any of us has to worry about!

As if the human race will not grow beyond where we are today during even the shortest of those lengths of time? Given what we've done in the last 100 years, where do you think we'll be 1000 years from now? Much less 1 million?

 

[MeteorWayne]

That's always struck me too. All this angst that is of purely academic interest to anyone alive today.

MTW, starRider...DUCK, MW's jet is heading your way!

 

[neilsox]

Andromeda will likely miss our super massive black hole by about 100,000 light years, so merger will not occur, and Earth will be little affected. Even if the black holes merged, the jet would likely be weak and miss Earth. Gliese likely will miss our sun by about one light year, so the Oort clouds may over lap (if Gliese has an Oort cloud) Thousands of years after the near miss, meteors might hit Earth twice as often as they have in resent centuries = no big deal. If humans are around that far in the future, we may have technology to prevent a major meteor hit. Neil

 

[bdewoody]

Yeah, I'm a whole lot more worried about how this new health care bill is going to affect me than I am about how the earth ends it's days.