What will happen to the planets when the Sun becomes a red giant?<\/h1>\n\n\n\n
Originally Published: Friday, September 18, 2020<\/p>\n\n\n\n
<\/p>\n\n\n\n A star\u2019s habitable zone, or the region around the star where temperatures are warm enough for a planet\u2019s surface to sustain liquid water, depends on the star\u2019s temperature and brightness. As a red giant, our Sun will expand and heat up, forcing its current habitable zone, which now encompasses Earth, outward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Astronomy: Roen Kelly<\/p>\n\n\n\n Q: How far will the Sun expand during its transition to a red giant? How many planets will be engulfed, and what \u2014 if any \u2014 effects will the expansion have on the giant planets\u2019 atmospheres?<\/strong><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Jacob Bertin<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n South Williamsport, Pennsylvania<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n A: Roughly 5 billion years from now, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen fuel in its core and start burning helium, forcing its transition into a red giant star. During this shift, its atmosphere will expand out to somewhere around 1 astronomical unit \u2014 the current average Earth-Sun distance. This means the Sun will gradually engulf Mercury, Venus, and likely Earth. Any surviving earthlings will have long since fled the brightening Sun \u2014 or, as some scientists recently suggested, moved the planet itself to a more sanguine orbit.The atmospheres of gas giant planets like Jupiter and Saturn will gradually erode under the increased radiation from the Sun. However, astronomers have found a number of gas giant exoplanets orbiting close to their red giant stars. These so-called hot Jupiters have managed to hold onto their atmospheres. Some of them even have enormous, puffy atmospheres that appear to have been pumped up by their star\u2019s intense radiation. So, our own Jupiter\u2019s fate is far from certain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The inner realm\u2019s doomsday will bring a brief new dawn to the outer solar system. Saturn\u2019s moon Titan, the only known satellite with a significant atmosphere, should keep its dense shroud. It could enjoy several hundred million years of potentially habitable conditions with liquid oceans of water-ammonia, simulations show. The environment may even resemble early Earth. Eventually, Pluto and its cousins in the Kuiper Belt \u2014 plus Neptune\u2019s moon Triton \u2014 could be the most valuable real estate in the solar system. When the Sun turns into a red giant, the temperatures there will be equivalent to those in tropical locales on Earth today, such as Miami Beach, according to Southwest Research Institute astronomer S. Alan Stern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eric Betz<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n <\/p>\n\n\n\n Article picked up from https:\/\/astronomy.com\/magazine\/ask-astro\/2020\/09\/what-will-happen-to-the-planets-when-the-sun-becomes-a-red-giant<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Lambda Concordance Model of Stellar Evolution states 5 billion years from now, red giant phase allegedly destroys inner solar system. That’s not a super late error bar, \u00b1250 million years on a span 5 billion years, right? I’m not exactly what the error bars are believed to be. Also, keep in mind, I don’t particularly … Read moreLambda Concordance Model of Stellar Evolution<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"pmpro_default_level":"","_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","pmpro-has-access"],"aioseo_notices":[],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6938"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6938\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/smashomash.com\/smashteam\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Red](\"https:\/\/astronomy.com\/-\/media\/Images\/Magazine%20Articles\/2020\/09\/Screenshot20200918141950.jpg?mw=600\")
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