Unbound Close Stellar Encounters in the Solar Neighborhood

Abstract

We present a catalog of unbound stellar pairs, within 100 pc of the Sun, that are undergoing close, hyperbolic, encounters. The data are drawn from the GAIA EDR3 catalogue, and the limiting factors are errors in the radial distance and unknown velocities along the line of sight. Such stellar pairs have been suggested (Hansen & Zuckerman 2021) to be possible events associated with the migration of technological civilisations between stars. As such, this sample may represent a finite set of targets for a SETI search based on this hypothesis. Our catalog contains a total of 132 close passage events, featuring stars from across the entire main sequence, with 16 pairs featuring at least one main sequence star of spectral type between K1 and F3. Many of these stars are also in binaries, so that we isolate eight single stars as the most likely candidates to search for an ongoing migration event -- HD 87978, HD 92577, HD 50669, HD 44006, HD 80790, LSPM J2126+5338, LSPM J0646+1829 and HD 192486. Amongst host stars of known planets, the stars GJ 433 and HR 858 are the best candidates.

25 pages, 10 figures+22 finding charts. to appear in AJ

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Cited by in corpus (3)

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• The Spider Stellar Engine: a Fully Steerable Extraterrestrial Design?
• On the coincidence between the close passage of HD7977 and the Pliocene-Pleistocene transition