You want to live forever

The star is called Gliese 710, and it’s why you want to live forever–or at least a very long time. Let’s say a million years or so. The Gaia Mission, the Milky Way galaxy mapping project launched in 2013 by ESA (European Space Agency) has surveyed over a billion stars with their position, motion, and distance from earth. The night sky seems pretty still, only affected by earth’s rotation (1 degree every 4 minutes), but when we speed things up a bit–say thousands or millions of times faster, you can see that our galactic neighborhood is pretty damn active, with whole star systems flying past us, away from us, and toward us. Scientists have taken this data and created projections of future motion, and some of the most incredible findings show which stars will come very close to our solar system, some of them passing through the Oort Cloud, the cloud of ice and rocky debris that defines the cosmographical boundary of our Solar System.  A star named Gliese 710 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gliese_710) is an especially interesting one, because it will pass so close that it will be within the Oort Cloud–within our solar system–in a bit more than a million years. I don’t know about you, but I want to see that. I want to look up in the daytime sky and see another star burning there–much smaller and farther away, but still, a second star.