All planets doomed: Scientists prove the Sun will wreck their orbits
The Sun will cause cosmic chaos (photo: Zelch Csaba)
The Solar System may experience the death of the Sun much worse than scientists previously thought - a new study by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) reveals a grim scenario for its future, according to a recent study published in the journal The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
Why even distant planets won't survive?
Previously, researchers assumed that planets close to the Sun, including Earth, would be swallowed, while more distant gas giants would remain unharmed. However, the new scientific work outlines a more alarming picture.
A team of scientists led by astrophysicists from the California Institute of Technology argues that even distant objects may not survive the one-billion-year mark after the Sun transforms into a white dwarf - an extremely dense remnant of an extinguished core.
Even before this point, there is a probability that planetary orbits will begin to intersect. This "dynamic instability" is capable of destroying the entire planetary system much faster than previously thought.
Unpredictable death of a star
To reach these conclusions, scientists used a supercomputer to model the movement of planets over billions of years as the Sun went through its final stages of evolution.
Researchers note that the transformation of the star into a white dwarf may be accompanied by chaotic jolts and sudden mass ejections. In other words, the final moments of our star's life will be unpredictable, and planetary orbits will be destroyed due to fatal chaotic scattering.
"Newton, contemplating the drifting orbits of Jupiter and Saturn, suspected that the planetary order was mortal, and three centuries of celestial mechanics—from the classical invariability theorems to billion-year numerical integrations—have progressively deferred that verdict, most recently to timescales far beyond the age of the Universe," the researchers write.
"Our results return the solar system’s dissolution to astrophysically familiar territory, and relocate its cause: not the slow seep of chaos, nor the chance encounter with a passing star, but the Sun itself, which in dying does not merely enlarge the planetary system it built —it shakes it, and more often than not, spills it," the authors summarize.
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