Conséquence du passage de Sholz dans Oort il y a 70.000 ans
Publié : 21 mars 2018 16:27
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How bright was Scholz's star at its closest? Was it visible to the naked eye? How intrinsically bright/luminous/massive would it have had to have been to be visible to the naked eye?
Scholz's star is currently V = 18.3 magnitude at distance 6.0 parsecs, so it has absolute V magnitude of Mv = 19.4. At its closest distance of 0.25 parsecs (52,000 AU) it would have been at magnitude V = 11.4 (there is a typo in Sec. 4 of the paper - the predicted V magnitude should be 11.4, not 10.3). This is roughly 5 magnitudes (factor of 100x) fainter than the faintest naked eye stars. As we mention in the paper, Scholz's star is a magnetically active M9.5 star - similar stars have been seen to flare by more than 9 magnitudes (Schmidt et al. 2014), so it possible that Scholz's star may have occasionally been a naked eye object for minutes or hours during rare bright flare events.
At distance 0.25 pc (52,000 AU), for a star to be naked eye with V magnitude brighter than 6, a star would have to have absolute V magnitude brighter than Mv ~ 14, roughly corresponding to a main sequence star of M5 type or hotter (~15% the mass of the Sun).