A new movie called “Project Hail Mary” is freaking people out over what happens if the sun starts to burn out.
Good news, from Virginia Tech astrophysicist Nahum Arav: we’re good for a while.
“The sun is a 4.6-billion-year-old star containing 99.9 percent of the total mass of the solar system,” Arav said. “It will continue to shine similarly to now for another 5 billion years.”
Actually, considering the sorry state of things right now, this may not be welcomed as good news by all.
An asteroid could still wipe out life on Earth, so, there is that.
If that doesn’t happen, and the humanoids haven’t taken over between now and 5 billion CE, or even if they have, whatever species is at the top of the food chain will face a situation as dramatic as the one in the movie, which stars Ryan Goslin as a scientist who travels light years in search of a cure for the problem.
“Our sun will then become a red giant and will expand in circumference to almost the Earth’s orbit,” Arav said. “That expansion will be followed by our sun shedding of all its outer layers, producing a brief planetary nebula. Afterward a tiny, extremely dense white dwarf will be left over, and that’s the state the sun will stay in for billions more years.”
That doesn’t sound good.
Neither does this:
“When our sun swells to the size of a red giant, the Earth will either be swallowed by the star or heated until it’s an uninhabitable cinder. Luckily, we have a long time to figure out what to do about it.”
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Chris Graham
