You can breathe a sigh of relief and remove the duct tape from the windows because the Solar System will not be affected by white dwarf WD 0810-353 for 29,000 years. ESO’s Very Large Telescope (VLT) shows that initial calculations were slightly off.

Sometimes you need to step back and look at the big picture. Unfortunately, the overall picture can be quite disturbing. It’s one thing to aspire to achieve great things and build a better world, but it seems a bit futile when you learn that a dirty, massive rogue star with two-thirds the mass of the Sun could destroy everything in 29,000 years.

It will make you think twice when buying a new carpet.

The latest scare emerged when astronomers Vadym Bobilyov and Anisa Baikova analyzed data sent in 2022 by ESA’s Gaia space observatory, which was launched in 2023. By examining the change in the spectrum of white dwarf star WD 0810-353 in the Puppis constellation, 36 light-years away, they calculated that the star is on a collision course with our solar system.

The rogue star doesn’t seem like much to lose sleep over, as it will pass within just 31,000 AU (2.8 trillion miles, 4.6 trillion km) of the Sun, but that distance means it will pass through its home Oorta cloud. Against icy objects, it is held in place only by the tenuous grip of the distant Sun. When something like a stray star passes through it, it can dislodge objects and send them into the interior of the solar system.

In short, it could cause a shower of comets and asteroids similar to the one that wiped out the dinosaurs within 29,000 years. But this will not happen. Another group of scientists from the European Southern Observatory (ESO) used the Focal Reducer and Low Dispersion Spectrograph 2 (FORS2) mounted on ESO’s VLT at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert in Chile.

Obtaining new spectra of the rogue star confirmed that initial calculations did not take into account the star’s strong magnetic field. Such fields can distort the spectrogram, pushing spectral lines and shifting them to new wavelengths. WD 0810-353 appeared to be heading towards us. A more accurate calculation was possible by correcting the spectrum with a polarization filter; This showed that the initial estimate was slightly off.

“We found that the approach velocity measured by the Gaia project is incorrect and that the predicted close encounter between WD0810-353 and the Sun will not actually occur,” says Stefano Bagnulo, an astronomer from Armagh and co-author of the study. . “In fact, WD0810-353 may not be moving towards the Sun at all.” Source