...nearest stellar neighbor, the Alpha Centauri system, is located about four light years away. While that's not very distant in cosmic terms, it's wide enough for our solar system to not be influenced by these alien stars. But in about 1.3 million years, a star named Gliese 710, which is about 60 percent as massive as the Sun, is projected to interrupt the Sun's hermitude by crashing right on through the far-flung reaches of the solar system. While astronomers have been aware of this stellar meetup for years, new observations from the European Space Agency's Gaia satellite, released on Thursday,...