Produced by: Tarun Mishra
As the sun grows into a red giant, its outer layers will expand, potentially engulfing Earth in a fiery demise, as predicted by the study published in Nature Astronomy.
According to astronomers from UC Berkeley, long before Earth gets swallowed, the sun’s heat will turn oceans into steam, making life unsustainable.
If Earth survives the red giant phase, the planet will heat up into a lava world, scorched beyond repair, revealed by the research from UC Berkeley’s study on planetary evolution.
The study suggests humanity may have a chance of survival by migrating to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, which could become habitable as the sun expands.
The study, led by Keming Zhang, explains that Earth may drift into an orbit twice its current size, escaping the red giant’s engulfing surface.
UC Berkeley's findings indicate that after the sun’s red giant phase, only a faint white dwarf will remain, casting minimal heat on Earth's frozen remains.
Solar winds, predicted to intensify as the sun loses mass, will strip Earth’s atmosphere, leading to its desolation, according to the study.
The study reveals that Earth's future could be one of eternal cold, trapped in a distant orbit as the sun transforms into a white dwarf.
Before the red giant phase, a runaway greenhouse effect will vaporize Earth's surface water, a scenario explored in the Nature Astronomy publication.
Source: climate.nasa.gov
Astronomers suggest that humanity’s best chance of survival may lie in the outer solar system’s moons, where water might exist under thawed ice, as the sun evolves.