One day, the sun will die.
Our beautiful star can’t last forever. Eventually, it will run out of elements fueling its fusion, and Sol will undergo a wild transformation into a white dwarf — puffing up into a red giant whose radius may reach Mars before spewing out its outer matter as its core collapses into stellar remains. Who only shines with the heat left by his death.
We have a good idea of how this will happen for the Sun itself, which will begin in about 5 billion years. But the planets – what about them? What about land? What about us?
A team of scientists, led by physicist Amornrat Ongwirujoit of Naresuan University in Thailand, analyzed long-term changes in the brightness of three white dwarfs, and extrapolated what this means for the planetary systems surrounding them.
Fortunately, we can rest assured that humanity (and whatever we evolve into) will be long gone by then, or extinct if not living elsewhere in the universe. But this beautiful blue marble that we call home, and other planets, will not escape harm. According to analysis of white dwarf stars, the Sun’s death throes will unleash carnage on the solar system.
In short, Mercury and Venus are gone, as is everything else in the innermost circle of the solar system. They’ll end up being torn apart and devoured by the sun, gobbling them up like planet pasta.
The Earth may or may not survive, depending on how its orbit changes in relation to the Sun’s shrinking mass and the changing interactions between the planets. If he narrowly escapes, it will look very different from the lush, habitable world it does today.
“It’s not clear whether the Earth can move fast enough before the Sun can catch up with it and burn up,” says physicist Boris Jancic of the University of Warwick in the UK. [if it does] Earth will [still] “It loses its atmosphere and its surroundings and it becomes no longer a nice place to live.”
How can we find out all this by looking at white dwarf stars? By studying changes in brightness.
Fluctuations in starlight can mean a few things, but if they are regular, the rise and fall in intensity could indicate that there is something orbiting the star, periodically blocking some of its light.
The three stars analyzed by the researchers in this latest study have changes in brightness that previous research suggests are caused by orbital clouds of planetary debris.
“Previous research has shown that when asteroids, moons, and planets approach white dwarfs, the enormous gravity of these stars tears these small planetary bodies into smaller and smaller pieces,” says Ongueroguet.
By studying 17 years of data on the three very different white dwarf stars, the researchers were able to piece together a picture of how this process evolved. All three stars showed signs of transits — dips in starlight — consistent with the giant, irregular debris clouds being crushed into smaller and smaller dust before disappearing, perhaps due to clumps of dust and rock being scattered into the white dwarf.
One star showed signs of some kind of cataclysmic event in 2010, and another in 2015. The third star had irregular dimming events every few months, chaotic fluctuations on the minute scale. The three stars are now behaving completely normally, with transit events no longer occurring.
This suggests that the dismemberment and devouring of planets is happening very quickly. But if Earth is destined for destruction, it is unlikely to be so violent.
“The sad news is that the Earth will likely be swallowed by the expanding Sun before it becomes a white dwarf,” says Gancik.
“For the rest of the solar system, some of the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and perhaps some of Jupiter’s moons, may be displaced and travel close to the final white dwarf to undergo the shredding process we investigated.”
No need to worry, though. Earth’s oceans will boil over in about a billion years, long before the Sun reaches that point.
The research was published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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