SPACE — Our solar system and everything in it, including Earth, will look very different when the sun dies. But whether the planet we call home will be swallowed by our dying star or will manage to escape its clutches, only time will tell.
A new paper entitled
‘Long-term variability in debris transiting white dwarfs’, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society on Tuesday, April 9 2024, states that two of the four inner planets of the Solar system, Mercury and Venus will almost certainly be destroyed and swallowed by the sun. However, Earth and Mars, which are also inner planets, are not certain to survive.
However, even if the Earth is longer than its star, unfortunately it is no longer habitable. Research by an international team of astrophysicists actually found that a number of moons on Jupiter will definitely be dislodged and torn apart when the sun runs out of energy.
Scientists have long predicted the terrible fate of our solar system five billion years from now. However, new research examines what happens to planetary systems like ours when their host star becomes a dead star or white dwarf.
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“Whether the Earth could move fast enough before the sun could catch up and burn it up is not yet clear, but (if it happened) the Earth would lose its atmosphere and oceans and would not be a great place to live,” said Professor Boris Gaensicke, from the University of Warwick.
If our planet were swallowed by the sun, along with Venus and Mercury, it would leave Mars and the four gas giants, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune orbiting the dying Sun. “Surviving asteroids and their small moons would most likely be torn apart and disintegrate into dust before falling onto the dead star,” the research team said.
Currently, the Sun is burning hydrogen in its core. But once it’s used up, it will expand and become a red giant, before ending up as a white dwarf, the final state stars are in when they have burned all their fuel.
Therefore, studying stars that have become white dwarfs will be useful to provide insight into various aspects of star formation and evolution. The researchers in the study wanted to know what happened to asteroids, moons and planets that passed near the white dwarf.
What they found was that white dwarfs would likely be extremely violent and disastrous. They came to that conclusion after analyzing transits of these objects, namely the decrease in a star’s brightness caused by an object passing in front of it.
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In contrast to transits by planets orbiting around stars, transits caused by debris are strange, chaotic, and irregular. “Previous research has shown that when asteroids, moons and planets approach white dwarfs, the immense gravity of these stars tears these small planetary bodies into smaller and smaller pieces,” said lead researcher Dr Amornrat Aungwerojwit from Naresuan University in Thailand .
Collisions between the pieces ultimately shatter them into dust, which then falls into the white dwarf. This allows researchers to determine what types of materials make up the planet.
In this new research, scientists analyzed changes in the star’s brightness over 17 years. They focused on three different white dwarfs that all behaved very differently.
2024-04-10 13:08:21
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