Well, that’s pretty much what scientists Garett Brown and Hanno Rein at the University of Toronto did for their recent study of what would happen if a neighboring star flew a little too close to our solar system. While they don’t expect a neighboring star to pass through the middle of our system, they looked at the potentially devastating effects of small shifts in the orbits of the solar system’s planets, caused by a star that comes just a little too close for comfort — a few billion miles away.

Solar Simulations

Brown and Raine ran nearly 3,000 simulations of varying degrees of perturbation caused by a possible stellar flyby, examining the aftereffects up to 4.8 billion years later. “Until”, because some simulations ended early when a planet was ejected from the solar system or destroyed. Yes! The results are quite shocking. Scientists found that just a 0.1 percent change in Neptune’s distance from the Sun could throw the entire solar system into utter chaos — and all because one star came within 23 billion miles of the Sun. To put that number in perspective, Proxima Centauri, our nearest neighboring star, is about 24.8 trillion miles away.

Reining It In

While a complete collapse of the solar system sounds like a pretty catastrophic event, this kind of collapse could span billions of years. “These weak perturbations don’t immediately destroy the solar system, they just spin it around a bit, and over the next millions or billions of years something will become unstable,” Rein told New Scientist. Perhaps a little more optimistically, 960 of the simulations resulted in insignificant changes. After all, as the researchers themselves concluded, this sort of thing happens in our corner of the universe only once every 100 billion years or so, with the effects taking millions of years to come into play. In short, it’s an interesting scenario to think about, but not one you should worry about—unless you plan to live forever. READ MORE: A passing star that shifts Neptune’s orbit could destroy the solar system [New Scientist] More on neighboring stars: Scientists spot a dying star brutally tearing apart its hapless planets