(ORDO NEWS) — A new study reveals what will happen when the Sun is on the brink of its death.
The sun is a fireball that works on the principles of nuclear physics and fuels life on earth. However, it will not always be so, and there will come a time when it will use up all of its hydrogen fuel.
In about five billion years, the Sun will run out of its fuel and become a red giant. It will then engulf the inner planets, Mercury, Venus, and possibly the Earth.
But don’t worry, by then, if our civilization survives, it may have left Earth and found new worlds.
A study submitted for publication in the Royal Astronomical Journal says that the interaction of a planet or brown dwarf with hot gas in the outer shell of a sun-like star could lead to a range of catastrophic consequences.
The researchers performed three-dimensional simulations of the flow near the planet, covered by a stellar shell.
They found that when the Sun begins to “eat” its planets, the brightness of the star can increase by several orders of magnitude, depending on the mass of the absorbed object and the stage of the star’s evolution.
“When the planet is inside the star, drag forces will transfer energy from the planet to the star, and the stellar shell can become unstable,” said Ricardo Yarza, lead author of the study from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
However, the team of researchers clarified that since evolved stars can be hundreds or even thousands of times larger than their planets, this scale mismatch makes it difficult to run simulations that accurately model physical processes.
The team of astrophysicists also found that no planet smaller than 100 times the mass of Jupiter would be able to escape from the shell of a sun-like star until it expanded to about 10 times the radius of the Sun.
The results of the study can be taken into account in future work on the effect of planetary absorption on the structure of a star.
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