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Only the time of its meeting the solar system is out...

[link to rt.com]

Star on course to meet Solar system identified

Edited 15 March, 2010, 10:22

Movement of an orange dwarf star with a mass of about half that of the Sun will eventually bring it right to the solar system, stellar data analysis indicates.

Yahoo StumbleUpon Google Live Technorati del.icio.us Digg Reddit Mixx Propeller The Gliese 710 from the constellation Serpens Cauda is due to arrive in about 1.5 million years, and has an 86 per cent probability of passing through the Oort Cloud, says Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg.

“Of course we are not talking about one star ‘ramming’ into another. Such an event is almost impossible. But during a close encounter, a passing star’s gravity field may affect objects in the Solar system. For instance, it can cause a comet shower, which would reach the region of big planets. Some authors believe comet bombardments in Earth’s past to be results of such showers,” Bobylev commented for RT.


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He added that, “Considering the fact that the comet shower would reach big planets some 0.5 to 1 million years after the passing of GL 710, the effect of the passage would not be catastrophic, and will happen over a very long period.”

The prediction is based on analysis of data from the European Space Agency’s Hipparcos astrometric spacecraft, which measured velocities of almost 120,000 stars in the early 1990s, as well as some recent data.

Bobylev analyzed the measured movements of about 35,000 stars in our neighborhood in the time interval from 2 million years in the past to 2 million years in the future. It resulted in adding nine new stars to the list of those which experience close encounters with the Solar system – either in the past or in the future, he reports in a paper published on arXiv.org website.

GL 710 was already known to have a scheduled rendezvous with us. However, Bobylev’s analysis indicates a high chance of passing closer than expected. It even has one chance in 1,000 of approaching close enough to significantly affect objects within the Kuiper Belt, i.e. planets, moons and asteroids. This could be bad news for our descendants.

The Oort Cloud is a hypothetical cloud of comets on the solar system’s boundaries, stretching about one light year away from the sun.