A star is hurtling towards us. It will almost certainly clip the outskirts of the solar system and send comets towards Earth - though not for a while. Vadim Bobylev of the Pulkovo Observatory in St Petersburg, Russia, modelled the paths of neighbouring stars using data from the European Space Agency's Hipparcos satellite and from ground-based measurements of the speeds of stars. He found four previously unidentified stars that will pass within roughly 9.5 light years of Earth. They will tug on the Oort cloud, a diffuse cloud of icy objects around the solar system thought to be a reservoir of comets. Read more
Title: Searching for Stars Closely Encountering with the Solar System Authors: Vadim V. Bobylev
Based on a new version of the Hipparcos catalogue and currently available radial velocity data, we have searched for stars that either have encountered or will encounter the solar neighbourhood within less than 3 pc in the time interval from -2 Myr to +2 Myr. Nine new candidates within 30 pc of the Sun have been found. To construct the stellar orbits relative to the solar orbit, we have used the epicyclic approximation. We show that, given the errors in the observational data, the probability that the well-known star HIP 89 825 (GL 710) encountering with the Sun most closely falls into the Oort cloud is 0.86 in the time interval 1.45±0.06 Myr. This star also has a nonzero probability, 0.0001, of falling into the region d<1000 AU, where its influence on Kuiper Belt objects becomes possible.
At its closest approach, Gl 710 will rival the brightness of the red supergiant Antares, although it is currently not even visible to the naked eye of Earth-bound Humans. Read more
Ed ~ There will be a few close flybys of four or five stars over the next few million years time. However, the disruption from those I suspect would not be that significant. Surprisingly there hasn't been a close flyby of a star for about 8 millions years (the last I believe was a close encounter with Altair). More significant event would be the affects of the passing of the Scorpius-Centaurus horde, that passed about three million years ago.
Gliese 710 is an orange dwarf star (K7 spectral class) in the constellation Serpens Cauda, with visual magnitude 9.66 and a mass of 0.4-0.6 solar masses. It is about 63.0 light years from Earth, but is notable because its proper motion, distance, and radial velocity[3] indicate that it will approach within 1.1 light years (70,000 AU) from Earth within 1.4 million years, based on the latest Hipparcos data. Read more