” … is nobody actually reading other peoples posts.
read what “Timothy from Boulder” said.”

I agree that Timothy’s posting is a very informative and that you are correct, I did not read his posting before posting my own. I did discuss both rogue stars and rogue planets up to 75 Jupiter masses (smallest possible stars) in my posting however. My statements did not say how big or how close these object would need to be to raise havoc with our sun. On close approach generally meaning the inner solar system including an impact with the sun, I think there is no doubt in the case of impact with the sun of a body of 75 times the mass of Jupiter, that serious repercussions would result concerning the Earth. On closest approach within .1 angstrom units from the sun, the repercussions concerning the Earth would be open for conjecture.

Well *I* am!

@75. Ryan : “There is an upcoming big budget movie about this very topic. It’s called “Melancholia” [Snip] about a rogue planet heading for Earth and ending Earth’s existence. I CAN’T wait to watch it!!!

I can. I’ll wait till its out on DVD or broadcast on the box.

@62. Michael Simmons : Thanks.

Also in the NewScientist issue 23rd July 2005 and again a cover story no less was an article titled “How many Planets in the solar System?” with the artwork having crossed out ’9′ and written ’23′ in red over it. This article dealt with the “oligarchic theory” of the formation of our solar system and suggested – based on claims by Eugene Chiang of the University of California and on Scott Kenyon’s computer models and theorising – that there may have been about 60 Mars sized bodies formed early in our solar system’s history and many of them were ejected out to now orbit around 1,000 to 10,000 AU with others being entirely ejected from our solar system.

What a co-incidence it might be if we could find one of those lost “sibling” worlds some day!

@84. Geo : I think the Enterprisecomes complete with astronomical charts and information provided already by the previous reserach of Humans and Vulcans and other Federation groups. I also do recall the ship(s) spending time on charting and stellar and planetary surveying missions,FWIW.

For those that might not have access to a super computer to study this , there are two GPU base n body simulators.
http://astro.pas.rochester.edu/~aquillen/qymsym/
“QYMSYM: GPU accelerated 2nd order hybrid symplectic integrator that permits close encounters. This is a parallel code running with CUDA on a video card that puts the many processors on board to work while taking advantage of fast shared memory. It is meant to do the same thing as John Chambers’ code mercury6 but in parallel on the GPU. ”
paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1007.3458

The second is Swarm-NG
http://www.astro.ufl.edu/~eford/code/swarm/docs/README.html
“Swarm-NG will focus on the integration of an ensemble of N-body systems evolving under Newtonian gravity. Swarm-NG does not replicate existing libraries that calculate forces for large-N systems on GPUs, but rather focuses on integrating an ensemble of many systems where N is small. This is of particular interest for astronomers who study the chaotic evolution of planetary systems. In the long term, we hope Swarm-NG will allow for the efficient parallel integration of user-defined systems of ordinary differential equations.”

Given the result that gas giant size planets and larger can fly though with little effect on the planets, the first thing that I think of is how common could this be occurring and what is the effect on the huge number of small objects in the solar system.

Chambers’ MERCURY symplectic integrator was used for my analysis, which ran the model for 500,000 years.

Another point people are missing is the time involved. Even in the one extraordinary case in the model where a 10-Jupiter mass passes closely by Saturn and sets up a catastrophic orbital instability (Jupiter and Saturn trade places 5 times; Saturn and Uranus are eventually ejected from the Solar System) the process takes over 100,000 years to occur.

In sci-fi, it is always ridiculously easy to FIND THINGS. In Star Trek, the Enterprise can scan planets and isolate the life signs of individual people. They can also detect space ships from light years away. In Star Wars, the Empire can find a rebel base with relative ease, just by sending out a few probe droids to random planets.

And the list goes on and on. I realize that this is in part a plot-moving device. Just as in crime stories, the pursuing killer and the fleeing victim always manage to bump into each other at a random gas station (even though the odds of that are astronomical), it’s necessary for protagonists and antagonists to find each other if they story is going to move forward at all. After all, it would be a pretty boring story if it read like this: “And so our hero fled the evil Zorgons and they never found him. The End.”

However, I also think it has something to do with the human mind’s inability to think about large numbers. If you wanted to get lost in this galaxy, NOBODY is going to find you, EVER. Period. I do not care how advanced their technology is, it WILL NOT happen. Space is just too damn big. I don’t care how sensitive the sensors are, they are NOT going to find some tiny little spaceship parked on a random ice moon between two stars. First off, it would take thousands of years to search a volume that large, and that’s only if you consider local space. If you start talking about the volume of a galaxy (like the Empire’s search for the rebels), you’d need the lifetime of the universe (and then some) to find something as small as a ship or a base. And quite frankly, if your stealth technology cannot mask you in a volume that large, then it is seriously CRAP technology.

So that’s something that I wish sci-fi would start addressing in a more “realistic” fashion. I realize that might seem like a silly request of a genre that regularly defeats Einstein by merely flicking the “hyperdrive” switch, but this is different. This isn’t a simple matter of finding a fictional shortcut around the universe’s speed limit. Doing a “sensor sweep” of a SECTOR of the galaxy and finding the ship you’re looking for borders on “magical”. It would be the difference between asking us to buy into Harry Potter having a magic wand that helps him cast spells or asking us to buy into Harry Potter putting on a magic ring and saying, “I wish Voldemort was dead, and that everyone he ever killed was alive again. Ta Da!”

The former is “believable” bit of fiction, but the latter is just a God-like deus ex machina. A ship drive that can generate a wormhole or drop the ship into a “hyper dimension” that speeds travel between two points? OK, sure, I’ll buy that “impossibility” for the sake of the story. But a magical, God-like “sensor array” that can find anyone, anywhere IN SPACE? Come on!! If the Romulans wanted to park an armada within 100 AU of Earth, NOBODY would ever find it, even without cloaking technology. It’s not like seaching for a needle in a haystack. It’s like searching for a needle in ALL the wheat fields on the planet!!

Rant over

sigh is nobody actually reading other peoples posts.
read what “Timothy from Boulder” said

Download something like Universe Sandbox and try if for yourself.
If you want the software used in a a lot of scientic papers for nbody simulations get
John Chambers Mercury program from here http://www.arm.ac.uk/~jec/
It is text based and in fortran.

The idea is that the sun would gravitationally attract such planets passing through our solar system and some could collide or raise havoc with the sun on close approach, or be captured by the sun, any of which could cause great disturbances to the Earth and solar system.

Also I’m thinking there probably are many rogue stars out there that move counter to the normal motions of the Milky Way that also could cause similar problems. Additionally the Nemesis hypothesis that could be a very small distant companion star to our sun (a red dwarf), a brown dwarf, a very large planet of some kind, all of the above being food for though for some final edition of Phil’s book, “Death from the Skys, part 86.”

Gravitationally to have any effect the object as to be around for a long time.
Any coming though is going to fly in and out before it affects any of the planets.

However…. anything flying though this
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/Animations/Outer_2011.gif

or worst this
http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/Animations/Middle_2011.gif
is probably going to throw something out of wack.

(gif animations are from http://www.minorplanetcenter.net/iau/Animations/Animations.html)