The Sun is undecomposed . Without our red-hot , gas ball of a friend , we ’d all be dead . More accurately , we would have never been put up ! So it ’s a good thing that our Sun has escapedsome very close encounterswith other whiz throughout its lifetime . But the risk is n’t over yet .
Newresearchfrom the European Space Agency ( ESA ) learn the motion of 300,000 stars in the Milky Way Galaxy , tracing the path of those stars relative to the Sun , and anticipating their movements up to five million years into the future tense . ESA stargazer used theGaia catalogue — which hold datum on roughly a billion stars — to make their determinations .
From their calculations , researcher forebode 97 whiz will pretermit our Sun by about 93.2 trillion Swedish mile ( about 150 trillion km ) at some point in time in the next 5 million years . Sixteen stars will graze our Sun at a distance of 37.2 trillion stat mi ( about 60 trillion kilometer ) . While that seems like a hatful — because it is — theESA reportsthis is actually “ consider reasonably nearly . ” At least , it ’s near enough to potentially perturb theOort cloud , a vast belt of icy cometary objects encircling our Sun at mind - bowl over distances .
One star in particular — Gliese 710 — is wait to whiz by our star by about 16,000 Earth - Sun distances in about 1.3 million years . Of all the genius the researchers studied , this is by far the closest one that will pass our superstar . While scientists have actually known about Gliese 710 ’s trajectoryfor a while , this young info intimate it could pass our Sun much closer than previously think . Its tango with our Sun could place a lot of comet into the inside Solar System , potentially on “ a hit course with Earth or other planets . ”
So even if you ’re suffer a bad mean solar day here on 1 AU , think back thing could always be bad : you could be witnessing an alien sunlight colliding with our own , ushering in the actual apocalypse .
[ ESA ]
AstronomyScienceSpaceStellar astronomythe Sun
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