Stellar Evolution Revealed: How a New Planet Discovery Could Predict Earth’s Fate in 8 Billion Years

Astronomers have discovered a distant planet, and that study may answer questions about Earth’s future. Analysis of the discovered planet can explain what awaits us in 8 billion years.

The planet named KMT-2020-BLG-0414 is located about 4,000 years ago. light years from Earth. It is a rocky object that surrounds a white dwarf. According to scientists’ estimates, our Sun will turn into a white dwarf in 5 billion years.

As we read on livescience.com, before this happens, there may be major changes in the solar system. Before the white dwarf phase, the star goes through the red giant phase. In the case of our Sun, this would mean expanding to the extent that it would swallow Mercury, Venus, and perhaps even the Earth and Mars.

However, if the Earth survives these changes, it may eventually resemble the planet KMT-2020-BLG-0414 that was discovered and described in Nature Astronomy.

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“We don’t currently have a consensus on whether the Earth could be engulfed by a red giant in 6 billion years,” said the study’s lead author, Keming Zhang, an astronomer at the University of California San Diego.

– In any case, people will only live on planet Earth for about another billion years. After this time, the Earth’s oceans will evaporate due to the uncontrolled greenhouse effect – long before they are in danger of being engulfed by the red giant – he said.

For most of their lives, stars burn up, turning hydrogen into helium in a series of nuclear reactions. When the hydrogen fuel runs out, the outer part of the star expands and its interior shrinks. The temperature and density of the center of the star becomes high enough to enable the synthesis of helium nuclei, and the next step begins – burning helium. As red giants grow, they increase in size hundreds or even thousands of times, which then include the surrounding planets.

The planetary system containing the newly discovered planet was first observed in 2020, when it passed in front of the light of an even more distant star. After looking at the star, scientists saw a planet that is twice the size of Earth and orbits the white dwarf at a distance of one to two times the distance from Earth to the Sun. The system also contains a brown dwarf, a star that has not burned.

Debates about the future of humanity continue. Scientists do not know if the Earth will survive when the Sun becomes a red dwarf or if the oceans will be prevented from boiling. Keming Zhang predicts that humanity may one day move to the icy moons of Jupiter and Saturn – Europa and Enceladus. In the future, these frozen objects will become objects with water on the surface.

– As the sun becomes a red giant, the habitable zone will move to the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, and many of their moons will become oceanic planets. I think in such a case humanity could emigrate there, the scientist concluded.