The fate of the Earth – in eight billion years

4,000 light-years away in our Milky Way Galaxy, scientists have discovered a small planet orbiting a white dwarf star. According to the researchers who presented their findings in Nature astronomyA planet can say a lot about the fate of Earth – in about eight billion years.

Our Sun is currently about 4.6 billion years old, and has barely reached half its age. Right now, the Sun is habitable, but as it approaches the end of its life, it will start to run out of fuel. It will become unstable and collapse. The temperature inside the star then rises dramatically, which will eventually cause it to swell into a so-called red giant. When the Sun reaches this stage, its diameter will be about 250 times its current diameter.

The truth is that The Sun will become so big that the inner planets in our solar system will be ridiculous. The two innermost planets, Mercury and Venus, will obviously be swallowed up by the Sun, with holes and hair. But how things are going for the third planet, our Earth, scientists do not agree on that.

It is possible that Earth will suffer the same fate as the other two Earths, but there is actually little chance of it surviving. When the Sun swells and becomes a red giant, it loses some of its mass. As a result, the planets are forced away from the Sun, and with a little luck, Earth ends up far enough away to escape the growing Sun.

– Currently, there is no (scientific) consensus on whether or not the Sun will swallow the Earth, says one of the article's authors, Qiming Zhang of the University of California San Diego, in a commentary.

He's here The newly discovered planet enters the picture. Because, according to scientists, it resembles the Earth, but after eight billion years, provided that the Earth remains alive. After a few billion years as a red giant, the Sun will collapse and turn into a so-called white dwarf. Any star that is not larger than our Earth, but has approximately the same mass as the Sun. Around the white dwarf star, the Earth will probably rotate in the same way as it always has.

But then life? Well, because of the sun's increasing heat, the oceans will evaporate long before that. Calculations appear All complex life forms – such as plants, mammals, fish and eventually even insects – will likely disappear completely in less than two billion years. Only simpler forms of life remain: bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Either underground or floating aimlessly in small pools of salt water. But after another billion years, they also disappeared.

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