Humanity to be burned alive when the sun swells to 100 times its current size
Stargazers discover grim evidence of the nightmarish fate that awaits our home world and everything that lives on it
PLANET Earth will be burned to a crisp as the sun swells to a hundred times its current size, scientists have warned.
If our species manages to avoid being wiped out by nuclear war, doomsday space rocks or apocalyptic epidemics, we may live to see the day our closest star swallows up much of the solar system.
Now boffins have been able to sketch an unprecedented portrait of our planet's future after discovering a star system which has already suffered this grim fate.
"Five billion years from now, the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size," said Professor Leen Decin from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy.
"It will also experience an intense mass loss through a very strong stellar wind. The end product of its evolution, 7 billion years from now, will be a tiny white dwarf star.
"This will be about the size of the Earth, but much heavier: one tea spoon of white dwarf material weighs about 5 tons."
Both Mercury and Uranus are likely to be swallowed up by the swelling star, because they are closer to the sun than our own planet.
"But the fate of the Earth is still uncertain," Decin added.
"We already know that our Sun will be bigger and brighter, so that it will probably destroy any form of life on our planet.
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"But will the Earth's rocky core survive the red giant phase and continue orbiting the white dwarf?"
Decin and his team have trained their telescopes on a star system called L2 Puppis, which is about 10 billion years ago and situated about 208 light years from Earth.
About five billion years ago, the star in L2 Puppis went through the same process our sun will undergo.
Scientists are now trying to work out what happened when it began to swell in order to have some idea about the fate awaiting Earth.
Luckily, we don't need to start worrying just yet: we have about five billion years left until our sun reaches the angry end of its life and wipes out everything on our planet.
Use the time wisely.
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