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Strange star HD 7977: influence on Earth’s climate discovered millions of years ago. A new study reveals possible serious consequences of cosmic encounters.
Planets, moons, suns—our solar system is anything but a static structure. Time and again, strange stars cross our path. According to a new study, such a “stellar flyby” could even have influenced the Earth’s climate.
Specifically, it is about a temperature maximum 56 million years ago. At that time, global temperatures suddenly shot up by up to eight degrees. The cause remains unclear today, but US researchers Nathan Kaib and Sean Raymond are now bringing a nearby star into play: HD 7977.
The sun-like celestial body could have come within 3,900 astronomical units of our system around 2.8 million years ago—that is ten times closer than the nearest star today.
Although the probability of occurrence is only five percent, the effect would be profound. According to the researchers’ simulations, such close stellar encounters could disrupt the orbits of outer planets, such as Uranus and Neptune.
Star encounters also influence the Earth via gravitational forces, so long-term orbital disturbances are conceivable, with consequences for the global climate. Kaib and Raymond, therefore, call for climate models to also take star flybys into account in the future.
Whether the distant star “HD 7977” was the trigger for a primordial climate chaos remains to be seen, but one thing is clear: Nothing is fixed in space. And sometimes all it takes is a single cosmic visitor to shake things up on Earth.
- source: oe24.at/picture: Image by Arek Socha from Pixabay
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