Sun has an important role in the life and sustainability of the solar system. The sun always shines on Earth every day until now. But what would happen if The sun is dead and stop illuminating the Earth?
Sun is currently considered to be in a major phase where nuclear fusion of hydrogen allows it to radiate energy and exert sufficient pressure to keep the star from collapsing under its own mass. The age of the Sun is predicted to be 5 billion years from now.
“Sun less than 5 billion years old,” said Paola Testa, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics as quoted from Live Science, Tuesday (12/21/2021). “It’s kind of a middle-aged star, in the sense that its life will be about 10 billion years or so.”
NASA reveals after Sun burning most of the hydrogen in its core, the Sun will transition to its next phase as a red giant. At this point about 5 billion years in the future, Sun will stop generating heat through nuclear fusion.
The sun is likely to expand
The outside part Sun that still contains hydrogen will expand, glow red as it cools. This expansion will gradually engulf the sun’s neighbors Mercury and Venus, and push the solar wind to the point where they destroy Earth’s magnetic field and release its atmosphere.
This would almost certainly be bad news for any life remaining on planet Earth at that time. Assuming anyone survives a 10% increase in brightness Sun, it is estimated that this phenomenon will evaporate Earth’s oceans within 1 billion to 1.5 billion years, according to a 2014 study published in Geophysical Research Letters.
Within a few million years of this initial expansion, it’s likely Sun would also eat Earth’s rock remains, according to a 2008 study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
Sun would then begin to combine the remaining helium from the hydrogen fusion into carbon and oxygen, before eventually collapsing into its core, leaving a beautiful planetary nebula (the remaining hot plasma shell) in its outer layers as it shrunk into a very dense, much hotter Earth-sized dead star. , known as white dwarfs.
– Advertisement –
–
