What are the chances for Earth when the Solar System collapses?

One day, the Sun will die. Our brilliant star – the Sun cannot last forever.

After billions of years of shining through thermonuclear reactions, the elements that power the Sun's fusion reactions will be depleted. When resources are exhausted, the Sun will undergo a tragic transformation before becoming a white dwarf. This process causes planets in the Solar System like Earth to suffer.

When the material does not create enough reaction energy to resist gravity, the Sun's inner core will collapse and the outer shell will swell, turning the Sun into a giant red star with a radius that can reach Mars. After ejecting all the shell material outward, the Sun is left with only the core, the remnants of a star. At that time, the Sun was smaller than the Earth and only emitted heat radiation.

Sooner or later the sun will turn into a giant red star. (Illustration).

We have predicted a tragic scenario for the Sun after about 5 billion years. But what about the planets then? What about Earth?

Physicist Amornrat Aungwerojwit of Naresuan University in Thailand and a team of scientists analyzed long-term changes in the brightness of three white dwarfs and inferred the impact of that on surrounding planetary systems. around three stars.

Fortunately, we can rest assured that humans at that time were no longer on Earth, or were living elsewhere in the universe. Our blue planet and other planets will not escape harm. According to analysis of white dwarf stars, the death of the Sun will cause carnage in the Solar System.

In short, Mercury and Venus are gone , as are all the other bodies in the inner Solar System. The end of these planets will be torn apart as their distance from the Sun's surface shrinks and is eventually swallowed by the Sun.

Earth may or may not exist, depending on how its orbit changes in response to the Sun's loss of mass and the gravitational interactions between the planets. If Earth were lucky enough to narrowly escape the Sun's scythe, our planet would also be very different from the lush and life-friendly world it is today.

Physicist Boris Gansicke of the University of Warwick in the UK said: 'Whether the Earth can move fast enough before the Sun swells, swallows and burns up is unclear. But if not swallowed by the Sun, the Earth's atmosphere would be blown away, and the oceans would completely evaporate and it would no longer be a beautiful place to live."

How can we know all this by looking at white dwarf stars? By studying changes in their brightness.

The flickering light of a star hides several things. If the flickering is regular, the increase or decrease in intensity could indicate that something is orbiting the star, periodically blocking some of its light.

The three stars analyzed by scientists in this latest study had changes in brightness that previous research suggested were due to orbiting planetary debris clouds.

Aungwerojwit said: 'Previous research has shown that when asteroids, moons and planets approach white dwarfs, the host star's enormous gravity tears these small planets into pieces. less'.

By studying 17 years' worth of data on three white dwarf stars, researchers were able to put together a picture of how this process might develop. All three stars have gradually varying luminosity, consistent with speculation that they have giant clouds of debris that are ground into smaller and smaller dust by the host star before disappearing, perhaps due to clumps of dust and debris. The rock was sucked into the white dwarf.

One star showed signs of some catastrophic event in 2010, another in 2015. The third star had unusual dimming events every few months and chaotic fluctuations on scale of several minutes. All three stars are now operating completely normally, with brightness changes no longer occurring.

This shows that the process of the host star tearing apart and swallowing the planet happens quite quickly. But if the Earth ends up destroyed, it will certainly not be too tragic for those who witness it because then the Earth will also be a desolate planet.

The bad news is that the Earth will probably be swallowed by the expanding Sun before it becomes a white dwarf, Ganicke said. As for the rest of the Solar System, some asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and even some of Jupiter's moons, could be knocked out of orbit and then move close enough to the dwarf white and then suffer the end of being chopped into pieces like the process we have researched'.

However, don't worry about humans then because Earth's oceans will boil in about a billion years, long before the Sun falls into death.