Sun to destroy Earth in 7.6 billion years

By Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Sunday, 24 February 2008 16:27

Science - Space

No need to panic just yet, but in 7.6 billion years, the dying Sun will expand and burn up our planet completely. The answer? Use a large passing asteroid to ‘nudge’ our orbit further outwards; live on space ‘life rafts’ or leave the planet in search of strange new worlds.

It sounds like something from an episode of any number of sci-fi TV shows – a solar system so old that its’ sun expands to swallow up the inner planets that have revolved around it for billions of years, threatening any remaining life on the planet’s surface.

While the figure was always put at around 5 billion years for this to happen when I remember going to school, University of Sussex astronomers have calculated that the Earth, in around 1 billion years, will see its oceans boil away into space.

They say this could be prolonged for another 5 billion years with changes to our planetary orbit, but if nothing is done, in 7.6 billion years from now the Earth could be a greatly diminished orbiting rock – if it survives at all.

According to a press release from the University of Sussex, Dr Robert Smith, the University’s Emeritus Reader in Astronomy, and his team, had previously calculated that the Earth would escape ultimate destruction, although be battered and burnt to a cinder.

Unfortunately, this did not take into account the effect of the drag caused by the outer atmosphere of the dying Sun – which would make the situation much worse.

Smith said that: "We showed previously that, as the Sun expanded, it would lose mass in the form of a strong wind, much more powerful than the current solar wind. This would reduce the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth, allowing the Earth's orbit to move outwards, ahead of the expanding Sun”.

But those were the old predictions, with the new one much more terrifying. Please read onto page 2 to see the new fate of the planet!