RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – A recent study has set a deadline for the solar system to vanish. But relax. Neither I, nor you, nor even our great-great-grandchildren will come anywhere near to experiencing this phenomenon. The extinction of planets orbiting around the Sun is projected to occur in one trillion years.
The article, written by scientists Jon K. Zink, Konstantin Batygin, and Fred C. Adams, from the Astronomy and Physics departments of universities in California and Michigan, in the United States, points out that the destruction of the solar system will be carried out precisely and ironically by the Sun, the star responsible for life on Earth.
According to the researchers, at a certain point, the Sun will stop emitting nuclear fuel and then will become a giant reddish star. During this process, the Sun will swell and exponentially increase in size. As a result, planets like Mercury, Venus and the Earth will be melted by the heat and be incorporated into the sun.
But the Sun will not swell to infinity. In the most recent projections, the star will eventually decrease in size after engulfing the first three planets. This is because, by exhausting its fuel, the Sun would lose mass and decrease its gravitational force. The result would be an increase in the orbits of the remaining planets and their distance from the star.
However, all of this is still merely a hypothesis and very difficult to prove. Researchers estimate that the sun will still be burning fossil fuel for five billion years before it initiates the process in which it will become a swollen red star. Even with computer simulations, it is virtually impossible to create a model that shows what is likely to occur from then on.
Hope on Mars
However, the models developed suggest that Mars may be the only planet to survive the end of the solar system due to the strategic position it orbits. This is because planets further from the Sun, such as Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, would be destabilized and ejected far from the solar system within a period of up to one trillion years.
The red planet that became an obsession for companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX would theoretically not be expelled from the solar system, because it is neither too distant nor too close to the Sun to be swallowed.