Star Predicted to Blast Through the Solar System

Ruh-roh…

http://news.discovery.com/space/star-predicted-to-blast-through-the-solar-system.html

Bad news:

An orange dwarf star named Gliese 710 is powering in our direction and an astronomer has calculated an 86 percent chance of the interstellar interloper smashing through the Oort Cloud, located in the outermost reaches of our solar system.

This could have the devastating effect of scattering the icy Oort Cloud objects (or OCOs), causing them to plunge toward the sun and the inner planets, potentially bombarding Earth with comets. … there’s an 86 percent chance the star will punch through the Oort Cloud (thought to be located about 50,000 AU — or nearly a light-year — from the sun). This may sound like a flesh wound, a near miss in cosmological distances, but any gravitational interaction with the huge chunks of cometary nuclei in the outermost extent of the solar system is bad news.

Good news:

In 1.5 million years.