When is the world likely to end? In a recent study in the Astronomy and Astrophysics journal, it was found that the end of all life on would happen if the sun expands to 100 times its size. This would just wipe out life on earth.
Researchers from Leuven, Belgium, studied the evolution of stars with some of the most advanced radio telescopes, and found that finally, the sun would undergo a change, leading to massive growth. Professor Leen Decin of the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy wrote: "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. It will also experience an intense mass loss through a very strong stellar wind. The end product of its evolution, seven billion years from now, will be a tiny white dwarf star. This will be about the size of the Earth, but much heavier: one teaspoon of white dwarf material weighs about five tons."
Even as the sun will expand by 100 times, it will just consume the first two planets - Mercury and Venus. Meanwhile, the earth will be heated, scorched and dead too, said the experts.
"We already know that our sun will be bigger and brighter so that it will probably destroy any form of life on our planet," Professor Decin said.
Researchers examined a star called L2 Puppis, a star located 208 light years away, with the help of the ALMA radio telescope. This is a revolutionary device using 66 radio antennas to create a huge, virtual telescope almost 10 miles in diameter.
The L2 Puppis is similar to the sun in many ways. Said Ward Homan, a Ph.D. student in astrophysics, that the nearby star had once been like the sun. However, it has now become very different. This reminds us of what would happen to the earth itself.
"We discovered that L2 Puppis is about 10 billion years old. Five billion years ago, the star was an almost perfect twin of our Sun as it is today, with the same mass. One-third of this mass was lost during the evolution of the star. The same will happen with our sun in the very distant future."
Hence, the L2 Puppis just expanded before it lost its mass. When they observed it, scientists found that all the planets that orbited it were lost. Only one planet is found orbiting it. Located about 186 million miles away from L2 Puppis, it might indicate what would happen to the earth when the sun begins to expand.
However, you need not postpone your holidays, vacations or dinner dates. The death will occur only 5 billion years later. This would mean that we might already have become extinct by then, or might have got technologically advanced enough to shift to another planet.
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