TOW #20 - Star Article (Starticle?)

Ron Cowen of Nature Magazine writes this article on stellar motion for Scientific American. It details how, 70,000 years ago, when humans were spreading from Africa to Eurasia, a stray wandering star briefly entered our outer solar system and then left soon after. The star is called Sholz's star and would have been just bright enough to see from Earth by early humans. The article is non-political and so it really only has two goals. One, convince the reader that this theory is accurate, and two, convince the reader that this theory is very important. An important and accurate new theory is all it takes to write a successful science article.
As there are two goals for this article, accuracy and importance, there are two strategies employed to meet those goals. The first is the arrangement of the article. The information is arranged starting with the smaller inarguable impacts on our scientific understanding of the early solar system, "has a mass about 8% that of the Sun and is orbited by a 'brown dwarf' companion", (para 2). It then moves on to perhaps more arguable but, if true, revolutionary effects on our world, like initiating mass extinction events by smashing through the Oort Cloud.
The secondary strategy of this article is meant to make the article's theory seem more accurate. Where the previous strategy was in subtle arrangement, this strategy is direct content. Through statements of observations and facts about our ability to map stellar paths and the interruptions in the consistency of the dust at the edge of our solar system, it implies the absolutism of the theory. It also directly claims, "The result is almost certainly correct, as predicting the nearly straight-line motion of nearby stars is a well-understood calculation," in a quote from a relevant astronomical resource.
This is a straight-forward article with straight-forward tactics. For once, the more direct of the article's strategies is more effective and the more subtle actually fails more in its task. This may be a hasty judgement, however, as the importance of the theory is easier to doubt than its apparently incontestable accuracy.