(Photo: Wikimedia Commons/NASA )
Earth is doomed, but you need not worry because you will not witness it. The expanding Sun will reportedly swallow our planet, and more celestial bodies will share the same violent fate.
Earth Will Have Violent Ending in 6 Billion Years
In a new study, researchers examined the brightness of three white dwarf stars for over 17 years. They wanted to know what would happen if the Sun shrunk to a white dwarf.
The scientists were able to identify the kind of objects and when they passed in front of the Sun by observing changes in brightness.
Because the planets rotate regularly, most stars exhibit extremely predictable brightness variations or transits. However, the researchers found that the transits surrounding white dwarf stars were extremely erratic and chaotic.
This implies that the eventuality of things encircling white dwarf stars will probably be disastrous and intense. When planets, asteroids, and moons approach a white dwarf's dense core, gravity tears them apart into smaller fragments. These fragments eventually smash into dust from their collisions with one another. This. Dust keeps circling the dead star until it finally spreads throughout the cosmic. This is why many of the bodies in our solar system aren't killed or ingested by the Sun welding.
"The sad news is that the Earth will probably just be swallowed up by an expanding Sun, before it becomes a white dwarf," Professor Boris Gaensicke of the University of Warwick said of the Earth's eventual fate.
"For the rest of the solar system, some of the asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter, and maybe some of the moons of Jupiter may get dislodged and travel close enough to the eventual white dwarf to undergo the shredding process we have investigated. A 'major catastrophic event' was recorded in 2010 for one of the stars the researchers analyzed, and they discovered comparable destructive periods throughout the stars' histories. However, studying white dwarf systems has proven challenging due to their unpredictable nature.
Fortunately, there's no need to freak out because scientists estimate the catastrophe will probably occur in six billion years.
What Is a White Dwarf Star?
A white dwarf is what stars like the Sun become after their nuclear fuel runs out. This kind of star expels most of its outer material near the conclusion of its nuclear burning cycle, forming a planetary nebula.
The star's blazing core is all that's left. This core heats above 100,000 Kelvin, making it a hot white dwarf. Over the following billion years, the white dwarf cools unless it is accreting material from a nearby star.
Soft, or lower-energy, X-rays have been identified from any of the nearby young white dwarfs. Extreme ultraviolet and soft X-ray observations have recently grown in strength as valuable tools for analyzing the makeup and structure of these stars' thin atmospheres.
A typical white dwarf is somewhat larger than Earth but half the mass of the Sun. The density of a white dwarf the size of Earth is 1 x 109 kg/m3. The average density of Earth is only 5.4 x 103 kg/m3. A white dwarf is, therefore, 200,000 times denser. Because of this, white dwarfs are among the densest groupings of matter -only neutron stars are more dense than them.
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