HALUAN PADANG – Currently, scientists estimate that the sun’s “life” is in a “major order” phase, which will end about 5 billion years from now, when hydrogen’s nuclear fusion allows it to radiate energy and exert sufficient pressure to keep the sun in shape. does not collapse under its own mass.
If likened to humans, the Sun is now in middle age.
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“The sun is less than 5 billion years old,” said Paola Testa, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, a collaboration between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory. “It’s a kind of middle-aged star, in the sense that its life will be about 10 billion years or so.”
After the sun burns most of the hydrogen in its core, it will transition to the next phase as a ‘red giant’. According to NASA, at this point approximately 5 billion years in the future, the Sun will stop generating heat through nuclear fusion, and its core will become unstable and contract.
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Meanwhile, the outer part of the sun that still contains hydrogen will expand, glowing red as it cools. It would then gradually ‘engulf’ the sun’s neighboring planets, Mercury and Venus, and propel solar storms to the point where they destroyed Earth’s magnetic field and released its atmosphere. This period is referred to as the ‘early expansion’.
Of course, this would almost certainly be bad news for any life remaining on our planet by then – assuming any survive the 10% increase in solar brightness that is expected to vaporize Earth’s oceans in 1 billion to 1.5 billion years. Within a few million years of this initial expansion, the Sun will likely also eat Earth’s rock remains.
The sun would then begin to combine the remaining helium from the hydrogen fusion into carbon and oxygen, before eventually collapsing to its core, leaving the planet’s beautiful nebula — the remaining shell of hot plasma — in its outer layers as it shrunk into a very dense, Earth-sized stellar corpse, much more dense. hot, known as white dwarfs.
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The nebula will be visible for only about 10,000 years, Testa said — a blink of an eye in cosmic time. From there, what’s left of the sun will take trillions of years to cool before eventually becoming an object that doesn’t emit light.
To arrive at this timeline for the Sun and other stars, scientists need to know how it radiates energy. But it is difficult to calculate before nuclear fusion in the mass of the sun can be accounted for.
“A lot of science is relatively new, as it was in the last century, because an integral part of understanding how stars work comes from understanding nuclear reactions and fusion,” said Testa, who researches heating mechanisms and processes for X-ray emission, such as solar flares, at outer layer of the sun’s atmosphere.
“Before the 1930s, one of the main ideas about how stars worked was that energy came only from gravitational energy,” he continued.
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Once astronomers and astrophysicists have a better understanding of fusion, they can produce more complete models, coupled with observed emission data from some stars, for stellar life.
“By gathering a lot of different information from many different stars, astronomers and astrophysicists can build models of how stars evolve,” Testa told Live Science. “This gives us a rather precise guess as to how old the sun is.”
This age — about 4.6 billion to 4.7 billion years — is also corroborated by the radioactive dating of the oldest known meteorites, which formed from the same solar nebula, a rotating disk of gas and dust that gave rise to the sun and planetary bodies around the planet. solar system.
Thanks to this tool, scientists have a good understanding of when the sun’s light will eventually go out and fade.
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