(ORDO NEWS) — Despite the development of technology and scientific progress, we still have a regrettable little understanding of the structure of our universe.
Travel to other galaxies, superluminal speeds, intelligent life on alien planets – space is fraught with many mysteries. And one of the most interesting is the red giants. We tell how stars turn into them and what will happen when the Sun becomes a red giant.
All stars in our galaxy go through a certain life cycle, which ends when the celestial bodies finally exhaust their fuel reserves – then the star either dies or turns into a black hole. These processes take billions of years, but the most changes occur right before the death of large stars. First, they swell to an incredible size, and then shrink just as sharply.
Red giants are called stars that have entered the first stage of this transformation. A powerful thermal reaction unfolds inside their cores, which pushes the upper layers of the contents of the star out – as a result, its diameter becomes hundreds of times larger.
The density of the celestial body decreases, but the density of the core, on the contrary, increases, due to which red dwarfs rapidly evolve into white dwarfs. The temperature of red giants is not so high (they heat up about the same as the filaments in light bulbs), but they emit much more light than ordinary stars.
What happens when the sun becomes a red giant
So far, the Sun is doing well: its age is about four and a half billion years, so the star still has to live and live until a stormy old age – at least as much. However, the amount of released thermal energy will gradually increase, so the future inhabitants of the Earth will inevitably face the problem of a strong greenhouse effect.
When the Sun nevertheless grows to the scale of a red giant, the effect of metamorphosis will be reflected in all the planets and celestial bodies of the system.
Its surface will almost reach Earth’s orbit: the dying star will completely swallow Venus and Mercury. Jupiter, Neptune and Saturn are guaranteed to lose their moons and rings, but absorb some of the contents of the Sun, scattered by the lunar wind.
Researchers and theorists so far can only guess what will happen to our planet. Some believe that the gravity of the red giant will pull the Earth into the bowels of the Sun, while others argue that the effect will be exactly the opposite – supposedly gravitational forces will throw the planet into deep space.
One way or another, due to extremely high temperatures, all life on Earth will die out. It is good that this will not happen very soon.
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