Estimated to have visited the ort cloud 70,000 years ago, the same time as the near extinction event for genus homo. Previously the thought was that a Toba eruption had plunged us into a volcanic winter that may have dropped global temperatures another 6 degrees C for several hundreds of years. So, the question obtains: What effect would you expect from Scholz’s star's near visit?
The Oort cloud would obviously have been disturbed enough to displace many comets to the inner solar system I would imagine. From memory from last year when this was discovered, the close encounter was a binary pair of Red Dwarf's, fortunately only a fraction the mass of our Sun. Otherwise we may not be here now.
It seems that the current theory is still that the extinction event was due to the Toba volcanic eruption.
Just coincidence? I have a thing about categorizing things as "coincidence". Maybe I look for causal connections when they ain't really there? Maybe, the tobo hypothesis guys hadn't thought of / known of Scholz’s star? Maybe it is just coincidence?
The Toba eruption occured between 69,000 to 77,000 years ago and the scholz star event happened between 60,000 and 85,000 years ago. So the Toba event seems to match up better and the arxiv paper indicates that there were probably negligable effects to the long period comets. Arxiv paper
Thanx origin I read that before I posted. Read all I could find---------original was in an email from last year---I don't always read all of the email, so some stuff moves to a back page. Tax time, so I'm reading old email--(playing hooky)--------. One nice thing about that habit, by the time i read the original, other people have written about the same event, so I get more information from different perspectives. I had thought that a disturbance in the ort cloud could send space objects into the inner solar-system, impacting and causing gravitational anomalies which could have led to triggering the Toba eruption? so All things considered: We're going with: Coincidence? (I appreciate that coincidence happens---maybe i'm being simple minded, but I prefer a logical linear sequence of events.) (sigh)
