Pedro Ignacio Deaza -La estrella de Scholz 11 de mayo 2018

Abstract

The interview with Pedro Ignacio Deaza addresses the so-called "catastrophic visit" of Scholz's Star to the Solar System approximately 70,000 years ago. The academic clarifies that the star is not currently passing near Earth, but rather that it traversed a region close to the Solar System in the past, reaching a distance sufficient to alter the trajectory of millions of comets. He explains that this hypothesis arises as an alternative to theories that attribute certain mass extinctions solely to the eruption of the Toba volcano in present-day Indonesia. Recent research suggests that the gravitational perturbation caused by Scholz's Star could have displaced a large number of comets from the Oort cloud, some of which would have impacted Earth and contributed to significant environmental changes. The lecture presented by Deaza outlines results obtained using computational models developed at the Francisco José de Caldas District University, which estimate the perturbation of millions of comets. Finally, the importance of scientific research and astronomical outreach to understand the evolution of the Solar System and the history of the Earth is highlighted.