News from November 4, Beijing time, according to foreign media reports, although our sun is still very young and can continue to burn and shine for about 4.5 billion years, but one day, it will die . Then what will happen to our solar system?
I’m afraid that the trouble has already begun before the sun died. The first thing we have to face is the aging sun itself. As the hydrogen inside the sun continues to fuse, helium-the product of the hydrogen fusion reaction-will continue to accumulate in the core of the sun.
When there are more and more useless by-products around, the fusion reaction of the sun becomes more and more difficult. However, the inward pressure of the solar atmosphere has not changed. Therefore, in order to maintain balance, the sun can only raise the temperature of the fusion reaction, and as a result the temperature of the core is getting higher and higher.
This means that as the sun gets older, it will gradually become brighter. For example, the sun seen by the dinosaurs is dimmer than what we see today. However, in a few hundred million years, our earth will become very hot under the blazing sun.
Our atmosphere will disappear. The ocean evaporates. For a while, the Earth and Venus will be a bit similar now, surrounded by a suffocating atmosphere of carbon dioxide.
Then, something worse happened.
In the final stage of hydrogen fusion, the sun will continue to expand, deform and turn red. A huge fiery red sun is bound to swallow Mercury and Venus. The earth may also be swallowed, or it may escape, depending on how far the sun will expand. If the expanding atmosphere of the sun also flooded our world, the earth would disappear in less than a day.
However, even if the sun does not expand to the point where it swallows the earth, our destiny is not much better. The extreme energy released by the sun will be enough to vaporize the rock. At that time, there will probably be only one big iron ball left on our planet.
Increased solar radiation is naturally not a good thing for outer planets. Saturn’s rings are made of water ice that contains almost no impurities. In the future, when the sun’s temperature rises, Saturn’s rings will no longer exist. The frozen world orbiting these outer planets will no longer exist. Europa, Enceladus, etc. will lose their snow and ice shells.
At first, only the enhanced radiation would destroy these four outer planets and deprive them of their atmospheres. These atmospheres are as vulnerable as the earth’s atmosphere. However, as the sun continues to expand, the outer tendrils of the sun’s atmosphere will find these outer planets. Relying on these materials, the outer planets can swallow themselves, and then become much larger than ever before.
But at this time, the sun will not stop. In the last stage of the sun’s life, it will expand and contract repeatedly like the heart, and this process will last millions of years. In terms of gravity, this is not the most stable state. A crazy sun will attract and repel outer planets in weird directions, which may cause deadly collisions of outer planets or kick them out of the solar system.
In the next few hundred million years, the outermost part of the solar system will become a place suitable for human habitation. When the huge fiery red sun releases so much heat and radiation, the habitable area (the area where the temperature around the star can just maintain liquid water) will move outward.
As mentioned above, at first, the moons of the outer planets will melt. After losing the snow and ice crust, there may be an ocean of liquid water on their surface. Eventually, Kuiper Belt objects (including Pluto and its mysterious partners) will also lose frost. One of the largest celestial bodies may become a mini-Earth, orbiting a deformed red sun in a distant place.
Next, our sun will give up struggling, and will fade the outer atmosphere in a series of big bangs, leaving only the stellar core: a hot cloud of carbon and oxygen.
This newly formed white dwarf star is still very hot and will emit X-rays that are fatal to known life. But in another billion years or so, this white dwarf will gradually cool to a temperature that is easier to control, and then stay in the vast universe for a long time.
This dim white dwarf star will create a new habitable area. However, since the current temperature of the former sun is not enough, this new habitable area will be very, very close to the white dwarf, closer than the current orbit of Mercury around the sun.
Under such a distance, any planet (or planetary core) will be unable to escape the fate of being disrupted by tidal forces, that is, the gravity of a white dwarf inadvertently tears the planet to pieces.
However, this may also be the best ending we can get.
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