There is one small red star in the Serpens Cauda constellation. You can only see it through powerful binoculars or a telescope. Scientists know this star as Gliese 710. It became famous after the publication of Gaia catalogues. It turned out that this star is flying towards our Solar system.
In the surroundings of the Sun, about half of all stars approach the Sun at different angles, the other half at different angles move away from us. If we analyze the data of all the stars in the latest Gaia DR3 catalogue, which are no further than 100 parsecs away from us and, at the same time, are approaching us, it turns out that the star Gliese 710 has the smallest annual proper motion in the sky. That is, among the selected stars, this star is maximally aimed at the Solar System. It looks almost stationary for many hundreds of thousands of years. Only its apparent brightness gradually increase. Analysis of the spectrum of this star has shown that it is approaching us at a speed of 14.4 km/s.
Now this star is located in the Serpens Cauda constellation, that is, not far from the part of space where the Sun is moving relative to neighboring stars. So, it would be more correct to say that this Sun is gradually catching up with Gliese 710 in space.
In about 1 million and 296 thousand years, the Sun will fly at a distance of about 0.051 parsecs from the star Gliese 710. The neighboring star will become the fourth brightest celestial object after the Sun, Moon and Venus. The minimum distance of 0.051 parsecs corresponds to a distance of 0.167 light-years, that is, 61 light-days or 10.6 thousand astronomical units. And although this is 350 times further than the distance from the Sun to Neptune, Gliese 710 will pass inside the Oort cloud and cause perturbation of the orbits of objects in this cloud. Some of these objects can rush towards the Sun and arrange a comet bombardment of the planets of the Solar System.
The sun will fly past this star, and it will move away from us against the background of the constellation Orion.
Throughout the video, the star Gliese 710 will be in the center of the screen. The speed of time will gradually decrease as the Gliese 710 approaches, so that the moment of convergence can be considered in as much detail as possible. After the approach, as the star moves away, the speed of time will gradually increase.
Watch the video with subtitles.
The video was made using own software. Information about the stars is taken from the Hipparcos catalogue and corrected by data from the Gaia DR3 catalogue.
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