When Will The Sun Explode?

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Video: When Will The Sun Explode?

Video: When Will The Sun Explode?
Video: What If the Sun Exploded Tomorrow? 2024, March
When Will The Sun Explode?
When Will The Sun Explode?
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When will the sun explode? - Sun, solar flares
When will the sun explode? - Sun, solar flares

One of the questions that almost always comes up in astronomy lectures: when will the sun explode? It is, of course, impossible to give an exact answer to it. But what will eventually happen to our star and the solar system can be predicted.

SPACE "CRADLE"

Stars, like people, are born, live and die. And if they are born in approximately the same way, then their life path goes and die in completely different ways.

Many modern astrophysical theories agree that stars are born from gas and dust clouds. Such a cloud, called the "stellar cradle", is very large, tens of thousands of times larger than our solar system, and very massive, millions of solar masses.

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The "star cradle" can slowly revolve around a galaxy for billions of years until an incident necessary for the start of "generic activity" occurs. It could be a collision with another "cradle", a passage through the dense arm of a spiral galaxy, or a shock wave from a nearby supernova explosion.

And then in the "star cradle" a gravitational collapse occurs, that is, a rapid contraction. The gas-dust cloud breaks up into clumps, some of which will retain their cloudy structure, but some, the "smallest" ones, weighing less than 100 solar masses, will be able to form a star.

Gas in small clumps heats up as it contracts and turns into a dense spherical protostar rotating around its axis. This is a stunningly beautiful process.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN NEXT?

Whether a protostar turns into a star depends on how high the temperature in its core becomes. If the temperature reaches about ten million degrees, thermonuclear fusion will begin in the core - the conversion of hydrogen into helium. Hydrostatic equilibrium will be established inside the newborn star, and further compression will cease. The star will become stable and start to glow.

Over time, planets can form around the star, and life can arise on planets.

But sometimes it happens quite differently. Sometimes the so-called "stillborn" stars appear. If the temperature in the core "falls short" of thermonuclear fusion, the star becomes a brown dwarf and dies very quickly, over tens of millions of years. It goes out without having time to really flare up. Fortunately, our Sun belongs to the first group, and it is destined to have a long (though not infinitely long) stellar life.

Even small, by cosmic standards, bursts of solar activity can cause magnetic storms on Earth and even disable equipment.

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"ENGINEER" IN DEEPER?

Astrophysicists estimate the Sun to be five billion years old. By analogy with human life, the Sun has already left the period of youth, but it is still very far from old age. The most that neither is the working time.

Here is our luminary and is working sparingly, converting hydrogen into helium and, due to this, illuminating and heating the world space and you and me.

It must be said that in the world "stellar hierarchy" the Sun occupies a very average position in terms of its mass, luminosity, and location. Again using human analogy, we can say that it works as an ordinary engineer in a small enterprise somewhere in the Russian outback.

(By the way, about the hinterland: this is a fairly accurate analogy, since the solar system is located between the two spiral arms of the Milky Way galaxy at a very significant distance from its center - 32,660 light years.)

The "stellar hierarchy" for astrophysicists is the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which establishes the dependence of the brightness (luminosity) of a star on its color and surface temperature.

According to it, the Sun is located approximately in the middle of the "main sequence", on which most of the stars we know are located. An ordinary, ordinary luminary of spectral class G, not quite a dwarf, but by no means a giant.

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SPOTS ON THE FACE OF THE LIGHT

Five billion years of thermonuclear fusion has led to the fact that approximately 40% of the hydrogen in the interior of the Sun has already turned into helium. The surface of the Sun is slowly but surely cooling down (now the surface temperature is about six thousand degrees, which is a thousand times lower than the temperature of its core and a thousand times higher than the temperature of the hottest corners of the Earth).

Just as the skin on the face of a person becomes covered with wrinkles with age, the "face" of the Sun becomes covered with spots. The nature of the spots is not fully understood, it is assumed that these are zones with a relatively low temperature in the solar photosphere and their own magnetic fields.

What will happen to the Sun and, accordingly, to the Solar System, when all the hydrogen in its interior is burned out? Will it end its days in the black cosmic cold or, conversely, in a flash of the brightest, unimaginable flame? And, most importantly for us, now living, - when can this happen?

AGE AND DEATH

Let's reassure the reader - according to all serious astrophysical theories, this will happen very, very soon. In the hundreds of millions, and perhaps billions of years, separating us from this sad moment, humanity will undoubtedly find a way to escape. Therefore, all of the above questions about the future fate of the Sun are for us purely theoretical, although of considerable interest.

Let's consider the most popular “doomsday” scenarios among astrophysicists.

In a billion or two years, the Sun will begin to "age". The main thermonuclear "fuel" - hydrogen - will remain less and less in the core, and the Sun, due to the violation of hydrostatic equilibrium, will first increase in size. From an ordinary yellow star, it will turn into a red giant the size of the orbit of Mercury.

WHAT WAITS FOR THE PLANET

The planets close to the Sun - Venus, Earth, Mars - will turn into waterless and lifeless stone spheres. The tongues of the solar corona will continuously lick the surface of the empty Earth, and its plasma will slow down its rotation, turning the circular orbit into a spiral.

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Perhaps the Earth will eventually fall on the Sun, perhaps not, because red giants live for a very short time, only some 100-200 million years. It is during this time that the last hydrogen atoms will turn into helium, the thermonuclear cycle will end, the reddened, swollen Sun will rapidly deflate, fall inward.

Gravitational collapse is happening very quickly, and in less than a few months, according to our time reckoning, the Sun will turn into tiny, the size of the Earth, but extremely bright due to its rapid contraction of a white dwarf.

And after a hundred million years, the white dwarf will cool down and become a black dwarf, a superdense and finally "dead" space object, only with its mass and gravity resembling the former radiant star.

ANOTHER SCENARIO

However, things can happen in a different way. As a person sometimes dies before the term from illness or accident, so our Sun may not live up to the age limit measured for him. Such a tragic accident for a star can become a supernova.

Due to its relatively small size, the Sun is not very likely to go supernova, but it is possible.

The fact is that, in addition to the conversion of hydrogen into helium, other thermonuclear reactions can occur in the interior of a star. When (and if!) The accumulated mass of the helium core becomes too large, the core cannot withstand its own weight and begins to shrink, the increasing temperature can cause the transformation of helium into carbon, carbon - into oxygen, oxygen - into silicon, and finally, silicon - into iron …

Naturally, an incredible, colossal amount of energy is released.

Solar Activity

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Like a cancerous tumor, a new, iron core appears and grows inside the star. It will grow until the ever-increasing gravity breaks down the structure of its constituent atoms. The electron shells of atoms will "collapse" onto their nuclei, transforming them from proton to neutron.

The core of the star itself will decrease in size by a factor of millions, between it and the outer shells of the star a vacuum layer will appear, into which these outermost shells will fall, heating up to an enormous temperature.

But there will be nowhere especially to fall, because the neutron nucleus will reflect the outer layers, like an experienced tennis player's racket - a flying ball. And then the reflected shells will explode, and the star will turn into a supernova.

If this happens to our Sun, then for several months it will emit as much radiant energy into the surrounding space every second as it previously gave in 10 thousand years.

And intelligent beings, located at a safe distance from the ceased to exist solar system, somewhere in the Andromeda nebula, will watch with interest a new, brightly glowing star object that has decorated their night sky, pointing fingers at each other. Or tentacles.

However, it is likely that these will be not just intelligent, but alien to us creatures, but our descendants. Because even in the unlikely event that the Sun turns into a supernova, they will have at least tens of millions of years (and this is a lot for evolution!) To find suitable new worlds and get to them.

Will it dissolve?

Recently, scientists have put forward several more original hypotheses of how our star might perish.

They argue that there will be no supernova explosion or "normal cooling" of the sun. Over time, the luminary will shed the old and unnecessary gas shell, like a snake - skin.

In the end, it will turn into a luminous cloud of planetary fog, which will cool down for several thousand years, and over time will simply dissolve into outer space. The planets of the solar system, left without a star, will become uninhabitable.

True, astronomers could not voice why the sun should face a different fate than any other stars that go through a full life cycle.

Well, let's not forget that apocalyptic predictions have been made at all times. Moreover, they were voiced by very serious people. The closest date for the death of the Sun is 2060. It was calculated mathematically by the famous Isaac Newton. '

In the winter of 2017, scientists using the Hubble telescope recorded in a photo the formation of a nebula as a result of the death of a star similar to the Sun.

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ONLY SMALL Echoes

By the way, even now, when the apocalypse is still very far away, the quite peaceful Sun sometimes has a very negative effect on all life on Earth.

Thus, Norwegian researchers, who began their research about ten years ago, processed the data of parish books in the Trondheim area in the period from 1750 to 1900. Researchers have compared the data on the life expectancy of people with the phases of solar activity and came to truly sensational conclusions.

People born during the peak of solar activity, on average (excluding accidents and illnesses) lived 5, 2 years less than those who were born in the years of minimal activity of the sun. Increased infant mortality was also observed during the solar maximum season. In addition, during these years, the birth rate declined, and more girls were born, who later turned out to be infertile.

Alas, the atmosphere is not able to completely absorb radiation during peak periods of activity. It is this that determines the decrease in the life expectancy of people born during the solar maximum.

The duration of solar cycles is 9-14 years. During the peak of activity, storms rage on the surface of the star, giant plasma ejections occur, and astronomers observe dark spots and flares. The solar maximum of 1859 is considered to be the strongest in the history of observations.

The sky blazed for several weeks, and the northern lights could be seen even where they had never been seen before. Needless to say, it was in 1859, according to the research of Norwegian scientists, that the maximum number of people who lived a very short life, as well as infertile women, were born in the Trondheim region.

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