Scientists say Earth will end when the sun runs out of fuel.
REPUBLIKA.CO.ID, JAKARTA — New research reveals that the Earth’s magnetic shield may not always protect the Earth. Scientists predict in the future billions of years the solar wind will be able to damage the Earth. Because, the solar wind will get stronger as the sun approaches its destruction. When the sun is destroyed, the Earth will also be destroyed.
“We know the solar wind in the past eroded the atmosphere of Mars which, unlike Earth, lacks a large-scale magnetosphere. What we didn’t expect was that future solar winds could damage even planets protected by magnetic fields,” said the Astrophysicist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland Aline Vidotto quoted from livescience on Thursday (22/7).
In a study published July 21, 2021 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers calculated how the intensity of the solar wind will evolve over the next 5 billion years, when the star runs out of energy.
At that time, the solar wind will be so strong that it will completely erode the earth’s magnetic shield. From there, most of the planet’s atmosphere will be blown out into space.
Billions of years from now, the sun is like all the stars in the universe. Eventually the sun will run out of hydrogen which triggers a nuclear reaction in its core.
Without this fuel, the sun’s core would begin to contract under its own gravity. Meanwhile, the outer layer of the star begins to expand. Eventually, the sun will become a red giant – a huge red sphere whose radius extends millions of miles beyond its current boundaries.
Meanwhile, according to the American Space Agency (NASA) when the sun’s outer atmosphere expands, it will penetrate every planet in its path. Mercury and Venus will almost certainly be obliterated. Earth, maybe.
After a billion years or so of expansion, the sun would collapse into a wrinkled white dwarf, faintly smoldering for several billion years before its flames flickered completely.
If Earth managed to survive the sun’s cataclysmic transformation into a red giant, planet Earth would be left in a very different solar system than it is today.
As the sun’s core contracts, its gravitational pull on the planets will weaken, causing any planets that aren’t swallowed up to drift about twice as far from the sun as they are now. The radiation coming out of the red giant sun will also be much more intense than it is now.
In other words, it is highly unlikely that life on any planet could survive the destruction of its sun. However, according to the study, new life can emerge from the ashes of the old once the sun contracts and turns off its strong winds.
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