Our solar system has been around for 4.6 billion years. It sounds like a long time, but it’s just a blip in the story of 13.8 billion years of the universe. One day, the solar system ceases to exist.
But when will the solar system end? And how does it die?
The answer to these questions depends on how you define death in the solar system.
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The solar system is made up of eight planets, several d stars, hundreds of moons, and billions of asteroids, comets, and metstones. The exact boundaries of the solar system are subject to debate, but there are three main candidates. KuiperBelt is an area of ice objects beyond Neptune. Heliopizes is where the solar magnetic field ends. and the all clouds, the theoretical ice clouds that go beyond both the Kuiper Belt and the Heliosphere. And, of course, at the heart of everything, the Sun brings it together with all the enormous gravity.
Like all stars, the sun ultimately dies. Now, through a process called nuclear fusion, it generates heat and light by converting hydrogen into hydrogen at the core. Fred Adams, theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Michigan, said the sun would continue to burn hydrogen for about 5 billion years. However, when that hydrogen fuel is gone, the sun becomes more and more unstable. Its core collapses, its surface expanding, transforming into a cool, bloated red giant that engulfs mercury and Venus.
Our planet may be on the borders of the Red Titan’s surface, Adams said, the possibility would be sucked into the Red Titan as well. But by this point, humans would have been gone for a long time. Mars probably survives the Red Titan, with all outer planets out of reach of the Red Titan. Stern said Oort Cloud will also become unstable, and the Heliosphere will shrink.
Related: When will the universe die?
About a billion years later, the sun will shrink to the size of the Earth and turn into a white dwarf. The solar system becomes a frozen, desolate place.
“From a livability perspective, it’s kind of the end of the solar system,” Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and lead researcher at NASA’s New Horizons Mission, told Live Science.
The death of the sun marks the end of the solar system as we know it, but that does not necessarily mean that its complete end. “The harsh, nerd answer is that the solar system will never end because of the evolution of the sun,” Stern said. Even when the sun is burning out, he said, many objects, including giant planets like Jupiter, will continue to orbit.
Furthermore, in the future, Adams said the possibility of rare events is increasing. Without the solar gravity, the solar system will become more and more confused as the gravity balance of the solar system changes. The risk of collisions, passing stars, or supernovas is also increased as they get too close to the solar system, tearing the celestial bodies and space rocks apart.
“We don’t wait until the universe is twice as old, we wait until we’re billions of times older, a trillion times older, and a times more older,” he explained. “If you wait, those huge timescales and rare events start to sum up. It’s rare to win the lottery, but once you play one billion times, you’ll get a better chance.”
Even if the solar system survives a catastrophic collision, it will not last forever. Some scientists also believe that the protons that make up our universe will collapse. Although this phenomenon has not been observed, theoretical experiments imposed proton lifetimes past 1034 years, and the number may be pushed back further as experiments to lifetimes continue to run.
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