The total solar eclipse may impress spectators this week, but viewers best beware: they'll be looking (through safety specs) into the face of death. That’s because scientists have now worked out how the Solar System is likely to meet its end – at the hands of our very own Sun.
So what do they think will happen? According to the study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS), parts of the Solar System will be sucked into a white dwarf star, crushed up, and ground into a fine dust. White dwarf stars are the final stage of a star’s life, once it has run out of fuel and does not have enough mass to become a black hole.
Specifically, they think this is what will happen to the asteroids and moons around Mars and Jupiter. They will be shredded and pulverised by the Sun’s gravity, which by then will have become a white dwarf.
As for Earth, they think the Sun will swallow it up before becoming a white dwarf star, when the shredding begins. But, study author Prof Boris Gaensicke told BBC Science Focus, this is due to happen "about six billion years from now, so no need for panic shopping!"
The team of scientists from the University of Warwick reached this conclusion by observing what happened to celestial bodies (asteroids, moons and planets) passing close to three white dwarfs.
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For 17 years they analysed what are called ‘transits’: when the brightness of the white dwarf stars dips because objects in a stable orbit pass in front of them. When a celestial body orbits a white dwarf star, these ‘transits’ are predictable.
When a celestial body gets too close to a white dwarf, however, the huge gravity of the star rips them into smaller and smaller pieces of debris – making a catastrophic death inevitable. The team found that, unlike transits of bodies in a stable orbit, transits of debris were oddly shaped and chaotic, suggesting the debris was being devoured.
On the bright side, when the white dwarfs swallow this debris, the researchers are able to tell what material the planet (or other celestial body) was made from.
“The simple fact that we can detect the debris of asteroids, maybe moons or even planets whizzing around a white dwarf every couple of hours is quite mind-blowing,” said Gaensicke, “but our study shows that the behaviour of these systems can evolve rapidly, in a matter of a few years.
“While we think we are on the right path in our studies, the fate of these systems is far more complex than we could have ever imagined.”
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