Close star encounters

Using van Leeuwen's re-reduction of the Hipparcos data complemented by the original Hipparcos and Tycho-2 catalogues, along with recent radial velocity surveys, I integrate the orbits of over 50000 stars through the Galaxy to look for close encounters. The search uses a Monte Carlo sampling of the covariance of the data in order to properly characterize the uncertainties in the times, distances, and speeds of the encounters.