Experts believe the Earth is possibly fated to meet a disastrous end – and they’ve detailed when the terrifying Armageddon will supposedly take place.
In new research, published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, scientists from the University of Warwickshire and University College London have been exploring a dire end-of-the-world scenario.
Titled ‘Determining the impact of post-main-sequence stellar evolution on the transiting giant planet population’, the paper claims that in the distant future, the Sun will unfortunately burn through the last of its hydrogen fuel.
Once this event takes place, it’s likely to start expanding into a red giant – a dying star in the final stages of stellar evolution, according to Space.
This red giant will then swallow the Earth, or be torn to pieces, say the experts.
The Sun is possibly going to swallow the Earth in the next five billion years (NASA/SDO)
According to the researchers, Earth’s demise may occur in around five billion years.
Speaking about this terrifying future, lead author Dr Edward Bryant, Warwick Astrophysics Prize Fellow, said our planet will eventually be drawn into the Sun by something known as ‘tidal forces’.
Tidal forces are based on the gravitational attractive force, as per the National Ocean Service (NOAA).
“As the star evolves and expands, this interaction becomes stronger,” Dr Bryant explained.
“These interactions slow the planet down and cause its orbit to shrink, making it spiral inwards until it either breaks apart or falls into the star.”
The experts came to the conclusion by using data from NASA’s Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).
They ran the data through a computer program to search for small dips in brightness that indicate an orbiting planet is passing in front of the star, as reported by the Royal Astronomical Society.
Out of 15,000 possible signals, Dr Bryant and Dr Vincent Van Eylen, astronomer and Associate Professor in Exoplanets at the Mullard Space Science Laboratory at University College London, identified 130 planets and planet candidates.
Of these, only 33 were new candidates detected for the first time. All of these were found to be orbiting closely around these stars.
Through this planetary study, the co-authors found that such planets were less likely to occur around stars that had expanded and cooled enough to be classed as red giants, suggesting that many of the found planets may already have been destroyed.
Our planet could be engulfed if the Sun becomes a red giant, as per the experts (NASA)
“This is strong evidence that as stars evolve off their main sequence ,they can quickly cause planets to spiral into them and be destroyed,” stated Dr Bryant.
“This has been the subject of debate and theory for some time but now we can see the impact of this directly and measure it at the level of a large population of stars.
“We expected to see this effect but we were still surprised by just how efficient these stars seem to be at engulfing their close planets.”
Meanwhile, Dr Van Eylen has said that, unlike some of the missing planets in their study, there is hope that the Earth may actually survive the Sun’s red giant phase.
“But life on Earth probably would not,” he added.
Now that the pair have this data, they can continue estimating the sizes or radius of the possible planets they’ve identified, and hopefully rule out any chance of them being low-mass or failed stars.
This can be done by precisely measuring host stars’ movements and inferring the gravitational tug of the planets from wobbles, as per the Royal Astronomical Society.
Dr Bryant added: “Once we have these planets’ masses, that will help us understand exactly what is causing these planets to spiral in and be destroyed.”
