A Visiting Star Jostled Our Solar System 70,000 Years Ago
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According to this research, a dim red dwarf star, along with its even dimmer brown dwarf companion—a kind of bloated gas giant that failed to ignite into a full-blown star—came to within 0.8 light-years of our Sun (4.7 trillion miles, or 50,600 AU, where 1 AU is the average distance of the Earth to the Sun), and possibly as close as 0.6 light-years (3.53 trillion miles, or 37,900 AU). That’s a close shave, at least by cosmological standards. By comparison, MU69, a Kuiper Belt object that will be visited by the New Horizons spacecraft on New Year’s Day 2019, is about 43 AU from the Sun.
Source: gizmodo.com
