John Carlos Baez on Nostr: - "Isn't there a star that's projected to come much closer than this, well within the ...

- "Isn't there a star that's projected to come much closer than this, well within the Oort cloud and maybe even near the Kuiper belt?"

Clearly there's not one projected to do so in the next 80,000 years. Wikipedia says:

"... it is hypothesized that 70,000 years ago Scholz's Star passed through the outer Oort cloud (although its low mass and high relative velocity limited its effect). During the next 10 million years the known star with the greatest possibility of perturbing the Oort cloud is Gliese 710. This process could also scatter Oort cloud objects out of the ecliptic plane, potentially also explaining its spherical distribution."

They give some references!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud#cite_note-algol-75

This one

https://authors.library.caltech.edu/55650/1/2041-8205_800_1_L17.pdf

says roughly

We combine velocity measurements for the recently discovered, nearby, low-mass binary system WISE J072003.20-
084651.2 (“Scholz’s star”) to calculate its past trajectory. Integrating the Galactic orbits of this binary
system and the Sun, we find that the binary passed within only 52,000 AU of the Sun 70,000 years ago, i.e., within the outer Oort Cloud. This is the closest known encounter of a star to our solar system with a well-constrained distance and velocity. Previous work suggests that flybys within 0.25 parsec occur infrequently (about one in 10 million years) We show that given the low mass and high velocity of the binary system, the encounter was
dynamically weak. Using the best available astrometry, our simulations suggest that the probability that the star
penetrated the outer Oort Cloud is ∼98%, but the probability of penetrating the dynamically active inner Oort
Cloud is about 1/10,000.