Orange Dwarf Confirmed to be On Collision Course With Earth
Gliese 710 should arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years Our solar system's 'hood may get a bit rougher sometime during the next 1.5 million years. An astronomer has given an 86 percent chance for a neighboring star to smash into the frozen Oort Cloud surrounding the outskirts of the solar system, and may scatter some comets toward Earth, Technology Review reports. That's not the only close encounter for our sun, according to Vadim Bobylev at the Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in St. Petersburg, Russia. He combined data from several databases of stars and found at least nine more stars that have already swung past the sun or will do so in the future. The data on Gliese 710, an orange dwarf star, comes from position and velocity measurements of about 100,000 stars in the Hipparcos Catalogue published in 1997. Updates for the Hipparcos data in 2007 allowed Bobylev to calculate the likelihood...