For over 4 billion years, life on earth has survived and prospered.
This aerial view of Grand Prismatic Spring in Yellowstone National Park is one of the world’s most iconic terrestrial hydrothermal features. The colors are due to the various organisms living in these extreme conditions and depend on the amount of sunlight that reaches the different parts of the sources. Hydrothermal vents like this are some of the best candidate locations for life to appear on Earth. (Credit: Jim Peaco / National Park Service)
But as time goes on, future disasters will afflict planet Earth.
This cut shows the different regions of the sun’s surface and interior, including the nucleus, where nuclear fusion occurs. Over time, the region of the nucleus where nuclear fusion takes place expands, causing the sun’s energy production to increase. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons / KelvinSong)
As the sun ages, its core expands and heats up, increasing the rate of nuclear fusion.
If all else fails, we can be sure that the evolution of the sun will result in the death of all life on Earth. Long before it reaches the red giant stage, stellar evolution will cause the sun’s brightness to increase significantly enough to boil Earth’s oceans, which will surely eradicate humanity, if not all life on Earth. The exact rate of the sun’s increase in size, as well as the details of its staged mass loss, are still not fully understood. (Credit: Wikimedia Commons / OliverBeatson)
After another 1 or 2 billion years, its energy production will cause the Earth’s oceans to boil.
Today on Earth, ocean water usually only boils when lava or other superheated material enters it. But in the distant future, the energy of the sun will be enough to do it, and on a global scale. (Credit: Jennifer Williams via Flickr)
Subsequently, the gravitational interactions between the inner planets disrupt their orbits.
The planets move in the orbits they make, stably, due to the conservation of angular momentum. Having no way to gain or lose angular momentum, they remain in their arbitrarily elliptical orbits far into the future. However, if they exert mutual forces and the sun occupies a finite volume, the gravitational and tidal forces exerted could lead to evolutionary scenarios so chaotic that one or more of these planets could eventually be ejected. (Credit: NASA / JPL / J. Giorgini)
There is a low probability that every rocky planet, including Earth, will be ejected.
When a planetary body is gravitationally disturbed enough, its orbit can become unstable, causing a catastrophe such as ejection or projection towards the sun, as shown here for HD 189733b, a planet devoured by its mother star. (Credit: NASA / GSFC)
After 4 billion years, the inevitable Andromeda-Milky Way merger occurs.
A series of still images showing the Milky Way-Andromeda merger and how the sky will appear different from Earth as it happens. This merger will occur about 4 billion years into the future, with massive star formation leading to a red, dead, gas-free elliptical galaxy: Milkdromeda. A single large elliptical is the final fate of the entire local group. Despite the huge scales and number of stars involved, only about 1 in 100 billion stars will collide or merge during this event. (Credit: NASA; Z. Levay and R. van der Marel, STScI; T. Hallas; A. Mellinger)
Despite the formation of new stars, supernovae, and stellar collisions, Earth is likely unaffected.
In about five to seven billion years, the sun will use up the hydrogen in its nucleus. The interior will contract, heat up, and eventually the melting of the helium will begin. At this point, the sun will swell, vaporize Earth’s atmosphere, and carbonize whatever is left of our surface. But even when this catastrophic event occurs, Earth may not be engulfed, remaining a planet, albeit very different from the world we know today. (Credit: ESO / L. Calçada)
A few billion years later, the sun becomes a red giant.
As the sun becomes a true red giant, the Earth itself may be swallowed up or engulfed, but will definitely be roasted like never before. Venus and Merucry will not be so lucky, as the ray of the red giant from the sun will easily encompass the two most intimate worlds of our solar system, but it is estimated that the Earth will be safe about 10 to 20 million kilometers. . (Credit: Wikimedia Commons / Fsgregs)
Destined to engulf Mercury and Venus, the fate of Earth remains uncertain.
When the sun runs out of nuclear fuel completely, it will blow its outer layers into a planetary nebula, while the center will contract into a compact, hot white dwarf star. It is not certain that this process will push Earth far enough to avoid being drawn into the central stellar remnant, or whether our planet will encounter our demise during this process. (Credit: V. Peris, JL Lamadrid, J. Harvey, S. Mazlin, A. Guijarro)
The loss of stellar mass pushes Earth’s orbit outward; we can still survive.
Once the sun exits its red giant phase its blown outer layers dissipate and only one white dwarf remains, many planets including, potentially, Earth will remain. If this event does not destroy our planet, we will probably survive another 10 ^ 26 years. (Credit: David A. Aguilar / CfA)
If so, we’ll be orbiting our remaining white dwarf for eons to come.
When a large number of gravitational interactions between star systems occur, a star can be kicked hard enough to be ejected from the structure of which it is a part. We still observe fleeing stars in the Milky Way today; once gone they will never come back. It is estimated that this will happen for our sun at some point between 10 ^ 17 and 10 ^ 19, with the latter option being more likely. However, most scenarios involve the Earth-Moon system remaining tied to the sun when this happens. (Credit: J. Walsh and Z. Levay, ESA / NASA)
After ~ 1019 years, massive interactions eject most stars and solar systems.
Particular patterns over time, or singular gravitational interactions with the passage of large masses, can result in the disruption and ejection of large bodies from solar and planetary systems. In the early stages of a solar system, many masses are ejected only because of the gravitational interactions between protoplanets, but in the later stages it is only random encounters that cause planetary ejections, and these are more rare than those that will eject entire solar systems. (Credit: S. Basu, EI Vorobyov and AL DeSouza; arXiv: 1208.3713)
Earth, however, remains in orbit around our stellar remnant, with gravitational radiation causing inspiration.
The effects of our planet moving and accelerating through curved space-time induced by the central mass anchoring our solar system will eventually lead to the disintegration of Earth’s orbit. This loss of energy due to gravitational radiation is slow but constant and will cause our planet to actually disappear after about 10 ^ 26 years. (Credit: American Physical Society)
After ~ 1026 years, the tides will fatally tear the planet apart.
When a single massive body gets too close to a larger mass, the tidal forces become large enough to defeat the gravitational bonding energy, tearing the object apart and stretching it into a ring, before it rains. and does not settle on the surface of the more massive body. The rest of the sun can do this to Earth in ~ 10 ^ 26 years. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)
The black dwarf corpse of the sun will finally devour the remaining ashes of the Earth: our ultimate end.
Once the sun has become a black dwarf, if nothing is ejected or collides with the remnants of the Earth, gravitational radiation will eventually cause us to spiral, tear apart and eventually swallow by the remnants of the Earth. our sun. (Credit: Jeff Bryant / Vistapro)
Only rare, isolated and ejected planets will remain intact longer.
Rogue planets can have a variety of alien origins, such as resulting from jagged stars or other materials, or planets ejected from solar systems, but the majority are expected to come from the star-forming nebula, as simple gravitational clusters that have never reached the star. size objects. When a microlens event occurs, we can use the light to reconstruct the mass of the middle planet. (Credit: C. Pulliam, D. Aguilar / CfA)
Mostly Mute Monday tells an astronomical story in pictures, visuals and no more than 200 words. Talk less; smile more.
