Sun After Its Death: Scientists Predict How, When It’s Going to Happen; What Will the Solar System Look Like Then?

Scientists have recently predicted what will happen after the Sun dies. Specifically, they made predictions about what the end of the Solar System will look like and when it will take place.

A ScienceAlert report specified that in the past, astronomers believed it would turn into a "planetary nebula," a luminous gas and dust bubble until evidence proposed it would need to be a fair bit more immense.

An international team of astronomers reexamined that suggestion in a 2018 study and discovered that planetary nebula, as shown and explained on NASA's website, is the most possibly the Solar corpse.

The Sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old, measured on the age of other objects found in the Solar System formed around the same time.

Based on examination of other stars, astronomers have predicted it will reach its life's end in around another 10 billion years.


The Sun in 5 Billion Years

Certainly, there are other things to occur along the way. This report specified that the Sun is due to become a "red giant in around five billion years."

The star's core will shrink, although its external layers will expand out to the Red Planet's orbit, engulfing the Earth in the process, if, according to the report, it is even still there.

One thing is sure-by that time, humans most certainly will not be around, the ScienceAlert report specified. In fact, it added, humanity only has around one billion years left unless there's a way off this rock.

This is mainly because the Sun is increasing in terms of brightness, is predicted to end life on this planet. There will also be evaporation of oceans, and the surface will turn extremely hat for water to form.

It's what's occurring following the red giant that has proven very hard to pin down. Many previous studies have shown that for a bright planetary nebula to form, the first star should have been up to double as immense as the Sun.

From Red Giant to White Dwarf

Nevertheless, the study in 2018, which was published in Nature Astronomy, used computer modeling to determine that, like most of the stars, about 90 percent of them, the Sun is most possible to shrink down from being a red giant to become a white dwarf, and then, as a planetary nebula.

According to Albert Zijlstra, an astrophysicist from the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom and one of the paper's authors, when a star dies, it is ejecting a gas and dust mass identified as its envelope in space.

He also explained, this envelop can be as much as half as the mass of the star, which reveals the latter's core which by this point in the life of the star, is running out of fuel, ultimately turning off before it finally dies.

It is only then the hot core that's making the ejected envelope shine extremely brightly for roughly 10,000 years, which, in astronomy, is considered a short period.

This is what's making the planetary nebula visible. Some are very bright that they can be seen from very large distances gauging tens of millions of light-years, where the star itself would have been quite faint to be seen.

This particular data model that the research team developed forecasts the different kinds of stars' life cycles to find out the planetary nebula's brightness linked to different star masses.

Related information about what will happen to the sun when it dies is shown on Business Insider's YouTube video below:

Check out more news and information on the Sun in Science Times.

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