What Will The Earth Look Like After The Sun Goes Red Giant?
It turns out that the Earth might survive after all
In approximately 5 billion years, our sun will run out of the fuel necessary to maintain the constant life-giving fusion that is taking place within its core. When our star eats up the last remaining dregs of hydrogen and helium, the sun will begin to die. During this phase, the star will begin to expand outward and dim, transforming from a standard yellow main sequence star into a red giant.
Red giants are 100 to 1000 times larger than our sun. As the sun expands outward, it was always thought that the Earth would be swallowed up by the expanding surface of the star. In this case, the sun would literally eat and vaporize our planet, leaving no trace of it—an inglorious and dreadful end to our world.
But new evidence has arisen, making it possible that the Earth might survive this cataclysm. Four thousand lightyears away, scientists have found a planet roughly the same size as Earth in orbit around a brown dwarf. The brown dwarf was once a star that expanded into a red giant before collapsing in on itself and cooling into a dwarf. The evidence of a planet of Earth’s size in orbit around this kind of star suggests that it survived the star’s death throes.
