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A stellar encounter is stars passing sufficiently close to each other to affect their trajectory significantly. Such encounters are rare outside highly dense regions such as stellar clusters, and result in somewhat Coulomb-like scattering on a stellar scale. An encounter sufficiently close that a star's change in velocity has a magnitude similar to its velocity compared to the average of its stellar neighbors, is termed a strong encounter (strong stellar encounter), and one producing less of a velocity change, a weak encounter (weak stellar encounter). Actual impact is very rare, but does happen.