Will the Earth, Mercury and Venus be swallowed by the Sun? Know what this study claims.
The sun is an angry ball of fire that operates on nuclear physics principles and powers life on Earth. However, this life-giving force will not always be so, and there will come a time when it will run out of hydrogen fuel. The result will be complete chaos. As its fuel runs out, the sun will turn into a red behemoth in nearly five billion years. Even though it will lose its ability to sustain life, it will go out for one more hunt in its neighbourhood, the solar system.
About The Study
According to the study, the Sun will swell into a red giant after another 4-to-5 billion years, entering the next stage of its evolution. In a study, researchers revealed the forces at work on a planet when it is swallowed by an expanding star.
According to the study, interactions between a planet or brown dwarf and the hot gas in the outer envelope of a sun-like star can result in a variety of outcomes depending on the size of the engulfed object and the stage of the star’s evolution. The researchers simulated in three dimensions the flow near a planet being engulfed by a stellar envelope. They discovered that depending on the mass of the consumed object and the stage of the star’s life, the sun’s consumption of its planets could increase the luminosity of a sun-like star by several orders of magnitude for up to several thousand years.
“As the planet travels inside the star, drag forces transfer energy from the planet to the star, and the stellar envelope can become unbound if the transferred energy exceeds its binding energy,” said lead author Ricardo Yarza of the University of California, Santa Cruz.
His team did note that it is difficult to run simulations that accurately represent the physical processes occurring at each scale because evolved stars can be hundreds or even thousands of times larger than their planets, and no planet smaller than about 100 times the mass of Jupiter can eject out of the envelope of a sun-like star before it has expanded to about 10 times the radius of the sun.
The findings of the study can be used to examine a future report on the impact of engulfment on the structure of the star. The European Space Agency recently revealed the Sun, which has an estimated age of 4.57 billion years and is currently enjoying its middle age while fusing hydrogen into helium and remaining relatively stable. When the hydrogen in its core exhausts and the fusion process changes, it will evolve into a red giant star with a lower surface temperature.
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