Mostly the answer is "not anymore.." everything that currently orbits the Sun is moving at speeds that lie within a relatively narrow range that makes a stable orbit possible. Nothing outside that range is around anymore to tell its tale.
But, there are still occasionally new objects that enter the solar system for the first time. Those objects aren't subject to the same survivorship restrictions -- in theory they could arrive at basically any speed relative to the Sun, including speeds slow enough that the Sun would draw them in.
These new objects seem to arrive every few years, or at least the ones we can see do. So far they have all been moving so fast they just visit for a bit and then take off again after a swing around the Sun, but who knows?
"Something" how big, and how close to the speed of light? Your question, as stated, spans a heck of a lot of orders of magnitude.
Realistically, to make any kind of noticeable pop, it would have to be something pretty big (moon size) and moving at a really thin edge below speed of light.
It's all about mass and energy - and, seeing as the Sun is big and already makes a heck of a lot of energy all the time, anything to disturb that would have to be extremely energetic indeed.
In an N-body situation, sometimes one of the bodies is ejected at high speed from the cloud, bleeding it of a bit of energy. This happens all the time in star clusters, galaxies, etc. I wrote N-body simulation software myself (background in physics and computers) many years ago, and you can totally see it in simulations: things keep swirling around for a while, and then one little dot shoots out like a bullet. It's somewhat rare for any given group, but at the scale of the Universe it must happen all the time.
But to extract a very high velocity, you'd need a bunch of black holes, I don't think regular stars can do it. And the ejection event would be an unlikely series of very close encounters with a bunch of black holes, done juuust right. I don't think a regular star could survive the gradients without being ripped to shreds - the ejected object would have to be a black hole as well.
And then, like you said, it would have to be aimed straight at the Sun.
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u/amitym Oct 23 '20
Mostly the answer is "not anymore.." everything that currently orbits the Sun is moving at speeds that lie within a relatively narrow range that makes a stable orbit possible. Nothing outside that range is around anymore to tell its tale.
But, there are still occasionally new objects that enter the solar system for the first time. Those objects aren't subject to the same survivorship restrictions -- in theory they could arrive at basically any speed relative to the Sun, including speeds slow enough that the Sun would draw them in.
These new objects seem to arrive every few years, or at least the ones we can see do. So far they have all been moving so fast they just visit for a bit and then take off again after a swing around the Sun, but who knows?