Scientists find out when the Sun exploded, swallowing Mercury and Venus

The sun is not so old as the other stars out there. However, scientists are trying to determine exactly when the Sun will explode.

It's not as simple as dating. However, scientists have found some key points about the future of the Sun, including the end of its existence.

When will the Sun explode?

While the complete 'death' of the Sun is still trillions of years away, some scientists believe that the current phase of the Sun's life cycle will end as early as 5 billion years from now. . At that point, the massive star at the center of the Solar System will eat through most of its hydrogen core. Accordingly, the Sun as we know it will explode.

When that happens, the Sun will become a red giant. It will stop generating heat through nuclear fusion, which NASA says the core will become unstable and shrinking around this time.

Once the core begins to destabilize, the outer layers of the Sun expand. That expansion will eventually swallow Mercury and Venus.

In addition, coarse winds from the Sun would strike the Earth, blowing away the magnetic field generated by its magnetosphere. It's a scary time to think about, especially when any human or animal life might still be in those years. Of course, there are a host of other threats from the Sun before that happens.

Picture 1 of Scientists find out when the Sun exploded, swallowing Mercury and Venus
The sun will explode at the earliest in 5 billion years

'Earth's future is grim'

While the idea of ​​the Sun "dead" is terrifying, there's still the risk that humanity isn't even present to experience it.

According to scientists, Earth's oceans will be evaporated by energy from the Sun in 1 billion years. At that point, the Sun's luminosity will also increase by about 10%. Not to mention there are other threats of climate change that also need to be taken into account.

In the end, Earth's future is grim, at least some scientists have said. Maybe that's why so many people focus on space travel and taking us to other planets. Not only will that allow humanity to continue to exist, but it will also give us a new home before the Sun explodes.

According to a 2008 study published in the Journal of the Royal Astronomical Society, within a few million years of its initial expansion, the Sun will likely swallow up all of the remaining rocky planets, including Earth. The Sun will then begin to fuse the helium left over from the fusion of hydrogen into carbon and oxygen, before collapsing and leaving a beautiful planetary nebula in its outer layers as it shrinks into a planetary nebula. Extremely dense, significantly hotter, Earth-sized stellar bodies known as white dwarfs.

Paola Testa, an expert on heating mechanisms and X-ray emission processes, once told Live Science: 'In the last century, there are many relatively new sciences, because in part it is indispensable. is needed to understand how stars, such as solar flares, behave in the outer layers of the Sun's atmosphere. Before the 1930s, one of the main ideas about how stars work was that energy came only from gravitational energy'.

With a better understanding of fusion, astronomers and astrophysicists can provide more complete models, along with observed emission data from some stars, of their life. .

'By aggregating various information from many different stars, astronomers and astrophysicists can build a model of how stars evolve. This gives us a pretty accurate guess about the age of the Sun," said Paola Testa.

The sun (about 4.6 billion to 4.7 billion years old) is also confirmed by radiocarbon dating of the oldest known meteorites, which formed from the same solar nebula.

The Solar Nebula is the gaseous cloud from which the Solar System is thought to have formed. This solar nebula hypothesis was first put forward in 1734 by Emanuel Swedenborg.

Thanks to that, scientists have a good understanding of when sunlight will eventually turn off and disappear.