Gaggle of comets poised to whack Earth ...

[Thad Floryan]

... bend over and grab your ankles. :-)

Another gem from /. today:

<http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/03/12/2216256/Nearby-Star-Forecast-To-Skirt-Solar-System>

A recent preprint posted on arXiv

<http://arxiv.org/abs/1003.2160>

by Vadim Bobylev presents some startling new numbers about
a future close pass of one of our stellar neighbors.

<http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/arxiv/24917/>

Based on studies of the Hipparcos catalog,

<http://heasarc.gsfc.nasa.gov/W3Browse/all/hipparcos.html>

Bobylev suggests that the nearby orange dwarf Gliese 710

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710>

has an 86% chance of skirting the outer bounds of the Solar
System and the hypothesized Oort Cloud

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oort_cloud>

in the next 1.5 million years. As the Oort Cloud is thought
to be the source of many long-period comets, the gravitational
effects of Gliese's passing could send a shower of comets into
the inner Solar System, threatening Earth. This news about
Gliese 710 isn't exactly new,

<http://astroprofspage.com/archives/664>

but it's one of the first times the probability of this
near-miss has been quantified.

[Xiongnu]

wow