Experts currently call the Sun 4.6 billion years old and estimate it will be dead in about 10 billion years. In a study published in the journal Monthly Notices of The Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers calculated how the Sun’s intensity would evolve over the next 5 billion years and run out of hydrogen energy.
Experts call this time Sun still in a stable cycle. In about 5 billion years, the Sun will turn into a red giant. The core of the star will shrink, but the outer layer will expand into the orbit of Mars and swallow the Earth in the process.
“We know that the solar wind in the past eroded atmosphere Mars, unlike Earth, does not have a large-scale magnetosphere,” study co-author Aline Vidotto, an astrophysicist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, said in a statement.
“What we didn’t expect was that future solar winds could damage even planets protected by magnetic fields.”
The sun will eventually run out of hydrogen. Astronomers predict that when hydrogen runs out, the Sun will become a nebula or an explosion of gas and light dust that fills space. Nebulae are the remains of stars that have died.
Without hydrogen, the Sun’s core would begin to ‘contract’, while the force of gravity began to take over the Sun’s core. Eventually, the star will just become a huge red giant and die. The sun will slowly die into a white dwarf.
Quoted from Space, to avoid that the Sun needs to grow twice from now. If that happens the Sun manages to survive its cataclysmic transformation and the planets Earth will be saved for the next 5 billion years.
In addition to being a reminder of life on Earth about the apocalypse, this research has implications for the search for extraterrestrial life. Some astronomers think the extinction of the Sun will actually lead to new life on planets around the Sun such as Mercury, Venus, Mars and Earth though.
This indicates it is highly unlikely that life on the planet could survive the death of the Sun.
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