Scientists believe that the massive ball of hydrogen and helium at the center of our star system was born some 4.5 billion years ago, allowing life on Earth to flourish billions of years later.
And while conventional models suggest the Sun will meet its final demise when it grows into a red giant and collapses to form a white dwarf some six billion years from now, the fate of its surviving planets remains a subject of debate.
Researchers had previously suggested that any planets in the star’s vicinity, including the Earth, will be swallowed up, while the more distant gas giants remain largely intact long after the Sun’s demise. But a new paper published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters paints an even more dire picture.
The team led by California Institute of Technology astrophysicist Konstantin Batygin argues that even these distant objects may not make it across the one billion-year mark after the Sun collapses into a white dwarf, an extremely dense husk of a stellar core.
They suggest that even before the Sun turns into a white dwarf, there’s a high chance that the orbits of the various planets will cross each other — a “dynamical instability” that could doom the entire planetary system much sooner than previously thought.
The latest findings suggest that the real chaos could kick off as little as a billion years after the Sun turns into a white dwarf.
To reach that conclusion, the scientists modeled the movements of the planets as the Sun went through its final stages over billions of years using a supercomputer.
They suggest that the Sun’s transition into a white dwarf could be marked by “stochastic kicks,” in which it will violently eject mass. In other words, our star’s death throes could be sudden and unpredictable, dooming the planets it formed billions of years previously by disrupting their orbits and triggering their ultimately fatal “violent scattering.”
“Newton, contemplating the drifting orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, suspected that the planetary order was mortal, and three centuries of celestial mechanics — from the classical invariability theorems to billion-year numerical integrations — have progressively deferred that verdict, most recently to timescales far beyond the age of the Universe,” the paper reads.
“Our results return the solar system’s dissolution to astrophysically familiar territory, and relocate its cause: not the slow seep of chaos, nor the chance encounter with a passing star, but the Sun itself, which in dying does not merely enlarge the planetary system it built — it shakes it, and more often than not, spills it,” it continues.
More on the Sun’s death: Scientist Reveals Plan to Save Earth From Destruction by the Sun
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