Good News! The Sun Might Not Eat Earth After All, According to New Simulations.
Good news, everyone! If, like me, you were worried that your plans to live forever were eventually going to be interrupted by Earth being swallowed by the Sun in about 5 billion years, as astronomers have long predicted, you may be able to cross that worry off your list. According to a new study published in Astronomy & Astrophysics , Earth might actually avoid being engulfed by our dying star after all. The old prediction was that when the Sun exhausts the hydrogen fueling its core, it will swell into a red giant large enough to consume Mercury, Venus, and eventually Earth. But new computer simulations suggest we might not get burned away like the dry leaf that lands in a hot grill. The outcome will come down to a kind of cosmic tug-of-war. As the sun grows, its increasing gravitational pull will gradually pull the Earth toward it. But, at the same time, this old star will be shedding huge amounts of mass through powerful stellar winds. Losing mass weakens the sun’s grav...