Gliese 710.

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A view of a small part of the sky as if you were staring at a star (centre) approaching nearly head on, and then as it passes by and away again. The motion can be likened to what an observer standing beside a road would see looking at an approaching car, and then swinging around to continue to follow it as it moves away. As a result, the objects in the background – in this case distant stars – become blurred as you move quickly to maintain a visual on the passing object. The focus of this animation is the star known as Gliese 710. It will have a close encounter with our Sun in 1.3 million years, passing within the Oort Cloud reservoir of comets in the outskirts of our Solar System. The star is predicted to pass within about 2.3 trillion kilometres, the equivalent of about 16 000 Earth–Sun distances. The star’s motion is set against a background of other moving stars and the visualisation covers, very quickly, the timeframe from about 1.1–1.5 million years in the future. The size of...

Galaxies Cluster Toward the Great Attractor

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Galaxies dot the sky like jewels in the direction of a mass so large it is known simply as the Great Attractor. div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: justify;"> The galaxies pictured above are part of a cluster of galaxies called ACO 3627 near the center of the Great Attractor. Previously, this cluster of galaxies, also known as the Norma Cluster, was largely unstudied because dust in the disk of our own Galaxy obscured much of its light.
The Great Attractor is a diffuse mass concentration fully 250 million light-years away, but so large it pulls our own Milky Way Galaxy and millions of other galaxies towards it. Many of the galaxies in ACO 3627 are slowly heading towards collisions with each other.

2P2 Team, WFI, MPG/ESO 2.2-m Telescope, La Silla, ESO
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