So, stars are a lot more mobile than I expected. 😃 Hopefully, it doesn’t cause too much damage next time it happens, if humans are still here by then.

Every 50,000 years or so, a nomadic star passes near our solar system. Most brush by without incident. But, every once in a while, one comes so close that it gains a prominent place in Earth’s night sky, as well as knocks distant comets loose from their orbits.

The most famous of these stellar interlopers is called Scholz’s Star. This small binary star system was discovered in 2013. Its orbital path indicated that, about 70,000 years ago, it passed through the Oort Cloud, the extended sphere of icy bodies that surrounds the fringes of our solar system. Some astronomers even think Scholz’s Star could have sent some of these objects tumbling into the inner solar system when it passed.

However, Scholz’s Star is relatively small and rapidly moving, which should have minimized its effect on the solar system. But in recent years, scientists have been finding that these kinds of encounters happen far more often than once expected. Scholz’s Star wasn’t the first flyby, and it won’t be the last. In fact, we’re on track for a much more dramatic close encounter in the not-too-distant future.

In the years since astronomers discovered the first exoplanet—a planet that orbits a star outside the solar system—more than 4,000 have been observed. Usually, their presence is given away by the slight effects they have on their parent stars, which vastly outshine them. For a decade and half, scientists have been trying to image exoplanets directly, but the Earth’s atmosphere presents a major impediment when they attempt to leverage large ground-based telescopes.

Now, a team of U.S. and Japanese scientists and engineers that includes researchers at UC Santa Barbara have developed a new exoplanet-hunting camera. Deployed at the Subaru Telescope on Maunakea, Hawai’I, the device is the world’s largest superconducting camera by pixel count and will pave the way for direct imaging of extra-solar planets in the near future. An instrument paper appearing in Publications of the Astronomy Society of the Pacific announced the new device to the astronomical community.

Constructed by researchers in the lab of Professor Ben Mazin, the MKID Exoplanet Camera (MEC) uses Microwave Kinetic Inductance Detectors (MKIDs) to enable scientists to directly image exoplanets and disks around bright stars. The detector runs at a brisk 90 millikelvin—just a touch over absolute zero—and is the first permanently deployed superconducting camera that operates in the optical and near infrared spectrum.