Our Sun is nearly 4.57 billion years old and is in the middle of its life cycle right now. But, as all good things must come to an end, the sun's extinction is unavoidable. According to a new study, the sun will engulf nearby planets such as Mercury, Venus, and Earth during its final years in the solar system.
The Sun is the origin of all life on Earth. It radiates light and heat, or solar energy, allowing various species to thrive on Earth. But what happens when the giant star's fuel runs out? This is the focus of a study published in the Astrophysical Journal by a group of scientists. According to the scientists' paper, the Sun will lose all of its life-giving powers and become a red giant in five billion years.
Giving details about the ensuing chaos, the researchers stated that our home, Earth, will meet an untimely end. They claimed that the Sun would consume Mercury, Venus, and possibly Earth.
The researchers ran three-dimensional hydrodynamical simulations to better understand what happens when a planet is engulfed by a Sun-like star. According to them, the outcomes are determined by the size of the engulfed object and the stage of the star's evolution.
When the Sun enters the red giant phase, its border will expand hundreds of times over.
The most recent research predicted several other outcomes: the engulfed planet could be pushed into a new, much tighter orbit, and others could help create a new world.
The European Space Agency (ESA) released research findings earlier this month claiming that the Sun has reached its middle age, estimated at 4.57 billion years. The Sun is also said to be having a midlife crisis, with frequent solar flares, Coronal Mass Ejections (CMEs), and solar storms.
The Sun will become a red giant, large enough to consume the inner terrestrial planets. The Sun is expected to gradually grow larger as the hydrogen fuel in its core depletes, leading to the slow spiral that will result in the Sun becoming a white dwarf. After running out of hydrogen and growing in size, the red giant phase of the Sun's class of stars sees the stars slowly burn helium into carbon.
Scientists at the University of California, Santa Cruz recently discovered that the interaction between the envelope of hot gas at the edges of a red giant and planets or brown dwarfs, which are the last stage remains of medium-sized stars, can have a variety of outcomes.
But, despite the fact that this is a common occurrence in the universe, little is known about what happens when the Sun consumes the planets. The enormous difference in scale between planets and their stars causes modeling problems.
One of the most likely outcomes is that the envelopment of planetary objects fuels the star, increasing its luminosity for millennia. However, if the object is large enough, say at least 100 times the size of Jupiter, it may be ejected from the stellar envelope due to drag forces.
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