Good News! Turns Out the Earth Will Never Be Swallowed by the Sun
Some good news and some bad news. The good news is that, contrary to earlier fears, Earth will probably never be swallowed by the sun. The bad news, of course, is that none of us will be around to find out.
Scientists have long estimated that in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of fuel, first expanding into a red giant and eventually becoming a white dwarf that will continue cooling for tens—if not hundreds—of billions of years. Amid this dramatic sequence of cosmic events, the fate of Earth remains uncertain.
Will it be pulled into the expanding red sun and disappear forever? Or, though long since rendered uninhabitable, will it continue orbiting the white dwarf remnant of the Sun until the universe reaches its eventual heat death?
Until now, the prevailing view among astrophysicists favored the first scenario. But a new study published in Astronomy...
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