Tuesday, 26 February 2013

star - How bright was Scholz when is passed near the Sun 70,000 years ago?

Currently, Scholz’s Star is a small, dim red dwarf in the
constellation of Monoceros, about 20 light-years away. However, at the
closest point in its flyby of the solar system, Scholz’s Star would
have been a 10th magnitude star — about 50 times fainter than can
normally be seen with the naked eye at night. It is magnetically
active, however, which can cause stars to “flare” and briefly become
thousands of times brighter. So it is possible that Scholz’s Star may
have been visible to the naked eye by our ancestors 70,000 years ago
for minutes or hours at a time during rare flaring events. The star is
part of a binary star system: a low-mass red dwarf star (with mass
about 8% that of the Sun) and a “brown dwarf” companion (with mass
about 6% that of the Sun). Brown dwarfs are considered “failed stars;”
their masses are too low to fuse hydrogen in their cores like a
“star,” but they are still much more massive than gas giant planets
like Jupiter.

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