At some
point in our distant future, the sun will be 100 times its current size, and
all life on Earth will be burnt to a crisp. But don’t worry, it’s not going to
happen for another five billion years, so you almost definitely won’t be alive
to see it happen.
So what
exactly do scientists already know about the future of our planet? Well, as
Professor Leen Decin from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy explains:
“Five billion years from now, the Sun
will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than
its current size. It will also experience an intense mass loss through a
very strong stellar wind.
“The end product of its evolution, 7
billion years from now, will be a tiny white dwarf star. This will be about the
size of the Earth, but much heavier: one tea spoon of white dwarf material
weighs about 5 tons.”
“The fate of the Earth is still
uncertain. We already know that our sun will be bigger and brighter, so that it
will probably destroy any form of life on our planet. But will the Earth’s
rocky core survive the red giant phase and continue orbiting the white dwarf?”
To
attempt to figure it out, Decin and his team have been looking at a very
similar constellation of stars that has just gone through the same process
we’re due for in approximately five billion years.
The
copycat star is called L2 Puppis,
which sits slap bang in the middle of the Puppis constellation, about 208 light
years from Earth. In astronomy terms, it’s practically our next door
neighbour. About five billion years ago, the star in L2 Puppis went through the
same process our sun will undergo.
In the process, it lost about a third
of its mass, giving important clues to the evolution our own sun will go
through. However, researchers are still trying to discover the effect L2
Puppis’ evolution had on its neighbouring planets. When they do, we should
be one step closer to discovering our own eventual demise. Who said science news can’t be
chirpy?
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