What will the Sun look like once it dies? Scientists have predicted what the end days of the solar system might look like and when they will occur. Humans won't be present to watch the Sun's final curtain call.
The sun produces energy for life on Earth, and mankind would not be here if it wasn't for this star. But then again stars have finite lives, and our sun will eventually perish. However, you do not need to be concerned about this solar demise anytime soon. The sun, like all stars, is powered by a churning fusion engine, and it has plenty of fuel remaining, around 5 billion years' worth.
Previously, astronomers predicted that the Sun would become a planetary nebula - a bright cloud of gas with cosmic dust - until data revealed that it would have to be a tad more massive. In 2018, an international astronomical team reversed the equation and discovered that such a planetary nebula is the most probable solar corpse.
The sun is approximately 4.6 billion years old based on the ages of other Solar System objects that originated around the same period. Astronomers believe that, based on studies of other stars, it will die in around 10 billion years. Space.com stated that there will be additional events that occur along the route. The sun will become a red giant in around 5 billion years.
Sun's Disappearance and the Limited Human Trace
The star's center will diminish, but its upper edges will extend out to Mars' orbit, enveloping our planet. If it still exists, one thing is for sure: researchers won't be here by then. Until humanity finds a way off this planet, mankind only has around 1 billion years remaining. This is due to the Sun's brightness increasing by 10% every billion years, as reported by Science Alert.
That may not seem like much, yet it is enough to terminate life on Earth. All seas will disappear, and the ground will be too hot to create water. We'll be as kaput as it gets. What follows after the red behemoth has been impossible to predict. Several prior studies have discovered that, for a brilliant planetary nebula to emerge, the original star must've been up to twice the mass of the Sun.
The 2018 research, on the other hand, employed computer modeling to establish that our sun, like 90% of all stars, is most likely to decline from a red giant to a white dwarf and to a planetary nebula. When a star dies, it ejects a cloud of gas and dust into space, known as its envelope. The atmosphere can be as large as half the mass of the star.
The data model developed by the researchers forecasts the life cycle of various types of stars to calculate the intensity of the planetary nebula related to various star masses. Planetary nebulae are quite abundant across the visible Universe, with prominent examples being the Helix, Cat's Eye, Ring, and Bubble nebulae.
Planetary Nebulae Producing Low Mass Stars
They're called interplanetary nebulae not because they contain anything to do with planets, but merely because when William Herschel discovered them in the late 18th century, they looked like planets through telescopes of the time. Roughly 30 years ago, scientists found something strange: the finest celestial nebulae in plenty of other galaxies are all around the same brightness.
This signifies that, theoretically, scientists may compute how far away other galaxies are by looking at their planetary nebulae. The facts indicated that this was right, but the algorithms rejected it, which has perplexed experts since the discovery.
Younger and much more massive stars should produce considerably fainter planetary nebulae with older lower-mass stars. Only for the past 25 years, this has been a subject of contention, according to professor Albert Zijlstra. The data indicated that brilliant planetary nebulae might be produced by low-mass stars such as the sun, but the models indicated that this was not conceivable; anything less than almost double the weight of the sun would produce a planetary nebula that was too dim to view.
A visible nebula cannot be produced by a star with just a mass just under 1.1 times the size of the sun. Bigger stars, up to three times greater dense than the Sun, will form brighter nebulae. The anticipated brightness for each of the other stars between those is quite close to what has been measured.
Zijlstra stated that not only do humans now have a technique to measure the existence of stars a few billion years old in galaxy clusters, which represents a pretty difficult range to measure, but mankind also knows what the sun will do if it dies. Their findings were reported in Nature Astronomy.
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