Advances in science in recent decades in the field of astronomy have allowed scientists to learn When and how will the last days of our solar system’s star be?. What we can take for granted is that no human being on this planet can be a witness!
There was a difficult path of scientific debate to understand how the process would work.. Initially, astronomers thought the Sun would become a planetary nebula — a glowing blob of cosmic gas and dust — but experiments suggested it must be a little bigger. It was back in 2018 The hypothesis that the planetary nebula is the most likely final destination has gained strength again.
Earlier, the increase in brightness of the Sun would end life on our planet
Sun is about 4.6 billion years old, based on the age of other objects in the solar system that formed at the same time. Based on observations of other stars, astronomers predict that It will reach the end of its life in another 10 billion years.
Other things happen along the way as described in A The article Scientific alertIn about 5 billion years, the Sun will become a red giant. The core of the star will contract, but its outer layers will expand to the orbit of Mars. drowning our planet in the process. If it still exists by then.
The Sun increases its brightness by 10% every billion years. It will end life on our planet.
But we won’t be here by then. truly, Humanity has only 1 billion years left, unless they find a way to get off this planet. This is why The Sun increases its brightness by 10% every billion years.
It doesn’t look like much, but the brightness increases End life on earth. Our oceans will evaporate and become too hot for surface water to form.
The final path to a planetary nebula
What comes after red giant status is difficult to predict. Many previous studies have found that for a bright planetary nebula to form, the initial star must be twice as massive as the Sun.
However, the 2018 study published Natural AstronomyIt used computer models to determine about 90 percent of the others As stars, our Sun often shrinks from a red giant to a white dwarf and then ends up as a planetary nebula..
“When a star dies, it ejects gas and dust into space called the envelope. The envelope reaches half the mass of the star. “This exposes the core of the star, at which point in its life it runs out of fuel, escapes, and finally dies,” explains Albert Zijlstra, an astrophysicist at the University of Manchester (United Kingdom). Article.
Planetary nebulae
“Just then, The hot core causes the ejecta envelope to glow brightly for about 10,000 years, a short term in astronomy. This is what makes planetary nebulae visible. “Some are so bright that they can be seen from very great distances, measuring tens of thousands of light-years, where the star itself would be too faint to see.”
They are called Planetary nebulae Actually they have nothing to do with the planets, but when William Herschel discovered the first ones at the end of the 18th century, Its appearance was similar to the planets through the telescopes of the time.
A data model developed by the team It actually predicts the life cycle of different types of stars, To find the brightness of a planetary nebula relative to different stellar masses.
“There is now a way to measure the presence of stars a few billion years old in distant galaxies, which is a very difficult limit to measure, but We’ve even figured out what the sun does when it diesexclaimed Zjlstra.
