Scientists at Naresuan University in Thailand have been able to predict the future of planet Earth when the sun dies.
What will happen to our beloved planet Earth when the sun dies? This is the question asked by Amornrat Aungwerojwit, a physicist from Naresuan University in Thailand. According to the analysis of white dwarf stars, carried out by a whole team of scientists from this Thai University, the agony of the sun will quite simply trigger real carnage in the solar system. An unprecedented event that could take the Earth with it.
First of all, it is Mercury and Venus which will disappear into the innermost circle of the solar system. The two planets will tear apart and be “devoured” by the sun. For its part, Earth has a tiny hope of survival, which rests on how its orbit will evolve in relation to the decreasing mass of the sun and the changing interactions between the planets. “Whether or not the Earth can move away fast enough before the sun can catch up and burn up is unclear,” says academic Boris Gänsicke, of the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom. In the best case scenario, if the Earth remained, it would still lose its atmosphere and its oceans. In other words, the “blue planet” would simply be unlivable.
To arrive at this theory, staff at Naresuan University therefore base themselves on the observation of white dwarf stars, and more particularly the evolution of their luminosity. Fluctuations in starlight can mean many things, but if they are regular, the increase and decrease in intensity can suggest that something is orbiting the star, periodically blocking part of its light. “Previous research had shown that when asteroids, moons and planets approach white dwarfs,” says Aungwerojwit, “the enormous gravity of these stars tears these small planetary bodies into smaller and smaller pieces” until their disappearance, probably sucked inside a white dwarf.
“The sad news is that Earth will likely be swallowed up by an expanding sun, before becoming a white dwarf,” says Gänsicke. “For the rest of the solar system, some of the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and perhaps some of Jupiter’s moons, could be dislodged and come close enough to the possible white dwarf to undergo the shredding process we have studied “, he concludes. But rest assured, the oceans and the Earth will melt in about a billion years, well before the sun gets to that point.
