The Shining - DEATH BY SOLAR CONSUMPTION!

As the Sun gets older, what disastrous threats will the it bring forth against not only the home of mankind, but the very survival Homo sapiens itself?

{Not Drawn To Scale}

“We all shine on

Like the moon and the stars and the sun

Come on and on and on…” –John Lennon, Instant Karma

I like to think that, regardless of whatever great forces of death we inevitably face, we all shine on and on and on in one way or another. As far as the Sun goes, I’m sorry John Lennon, it will shine come on and on and then it won’t. The Sun has burnt through about half of its hydrogen supply; when it’s done with the other half in about five billion years, it will drastically change prior to fading away. Maybe John Lennon was right; maybe we shine on exactly like the Sun; maybe when the Sun stops shining on, we will too.

Come the end of their lives, stars way bigger than the Sun detonate under their own forces and create supernovae. Typically when this happens, they sling most of their residential planets way out of orbit and into space. These planets then become what are called rogue planets, or planets that are not bound to an orbit. These planets are particularly hard to find since they are not very bright and don’t regularly eclipse stars. Dr. Michael Liu and his team at University of Hawaii recently found the rogue star J318.5-22 at roughly 80 light-years away. In his excitement after finding it he said, “We have never before seen an object free-floating in space that looks like this. It has all the characteristics of young planets found around other stars, but it is drifting out there all alone."

When stars similar to the Sun deplete their nuclear fuel in their cores they swell up into red giants. When experiences this in five billion years, it will definitely grow to a size so large that it swallows the inner planets, Mercury and Venus, and maybe even so large that it engulfs Earths orbit as well. Theoretical physicist Eva Villaver at el Universidad Autónoma de Madrid describes two things that could happen to Earth when the Sun reaches this stage. The Sun could hurl its outer layers past us, and deep into space (creation of a planetary nebua), causing Earth to end up in a wider and safer orbit outside of the Sun’s bite. At the same time, the Sun’s tidal forces that would pull Earth inward could counteract this, causing Earth to be eaten by the Sun. Villaver says, “We don't know which effect will be strongest.”

Several factors make the fate of the Earth even harder to predict. The influence that the planets will have on the Sun during its evolution is one of them. The Sun will increase the energy in its outer layers after swallowing Mercury and Venus. This not only generates uncertainties in how much matter the Sun could expel past Earth, but also those on what the tidal forces will be like. Tidal interactions with Earth will dump more energy into the Sun’s outer layers. These surges could cause the Sun to shoot even more matter into space. While this may give Earth a safer orbit, its magnetic field, which acts as a shield, will certainly not be able to keep Earth’s surface protected from all of the Sun’s projections. The magnetic shield is definitely not anything that could protect Earth against Mars. According to astrophysicist Boris Gänsicke of the University of Warwick in Coventry, Earth may be pushed back into an orbit that intersects with that of Mars, causing the two planets to splinter into trillions of asteroids. This stage of the Sun’s evolution could will completely change the surface conditions on Earth, and maybe even conditions within Earth as well.

The tidal forces caused by the Sun’s swelling could be so great that they cause the Earth to periodically expand and contract, generating an insane amount of internal stresses that will lead to the Earth heating up.

Io is my favorite moon and a pretty sweet example of a celestial body under crazy tidal forces, making it an example of what Earth could come to during red giant stage of the Sun. Io is one of the four Galilean moons (moons discovered by Galileo) that orbit Jupiter. With more than 400 active volcanoes, it is the single most geologically active celestial body in our solar system. Io’s volcanoes blast plumes of sulfur up to 500 kilometers into the atmosphere. Its silicate crust has been uplifted into more than 100 mountains, a few of which are taller than Mount Everest. This insane amount of geologic activity is derived from tidal heating that’s caused by internal friction created by the tugging and pulling effect of tidal forces.

Io was named after the Princess of Argos, a mythological character who Zeus fell in love with. To keep Hera from finding him seducing Io, Zeus covered the world with a thick blanket of clouds. This only enticed Hera’s suspicion. As she began to disperse the clouds, Zeus improvised and quickly turned the lovely princess into a cow. He then testified that he knew nothing of the cow and that it sprang right out of the Earth.

Io’s name is quite fitting for a moon of its characteristic. Its volcanoes not only project dark clouds into the sky, but they produce lava flows that change the appearance of the moon, coating it with yellow, red, white, black, and green allotropes. It has gushes lava flows that leak all over the place, some reaching over 300 miles in length. Io’s volcanic ejecta even interacts with Jupiter’s magnetosphere and creates what is known as a plasma torus, basically a cloud of gas and plasma, that encompasses Jupiter.

*This guy Larry Niven wrote his novels The Integral Trees and The Smoke Ring wherein a giant gas planet orbitting a neutron star generates a gas torus dense enough to sustain human life. This is completely implausible

This is only modest for what tides could actually do to the Earth. If powerful enough, they could shred the Earth into a trillion fragments.

Even if Earth does survive the Sun’s Red Giant phase, it is only in futility, for the doom of life on Earth is lurking in the next stage of the Sun’s evolution.  As the Sun ages into its next phase, it discharges its outer layers into deep space and then compacts into a white dwarf star. Eric Agol of the University of Washington asserts that Earth-sized planets can actually end up close enough to a white dwarf where they can exist in habitable temperatures for billions of years. In fact, several examples of this have been found.

On the other hand, if Earth ends up in a trillion pieces, its remains could either rain down into the atmosphere of the white dwarf Sun, or create a disk around it. This happened to a solar system that’s only 50 light-years away. Gänsicke talks about how white dwarf GD61 has an excess of oxygen in its atmosphere that could be remnant of an Earth like planet that did not survive its physical changes.

Agol also thinks speaks of second-generation planets that form in the ring that surrounds a white dwarf, “We can't exclude that a second generation of rocky planets might form from these disks.” This means that the very fragments left behind by previously destroyed worlds can smash into each other, accumulate, and resurrect into new worlds

 “The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff.”  - Carl Sagan, Cosmos

In this, in some kind of an abstract reincarnation, we do shine on and on and on. Not even the tremendous power of the universe can completely erase matter. It gets broken down and transformed but not erased. What was the Earth and you and me gets recycled into something else which then shines on until the time has come for it to be recycled into something else that will shine – unless it’s a black hole, they’re black and not very shiny – an existential universe.


Here is a really interesting video on what the Earth would be like if the Sun were to suddenly vanish. 
Night Night
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rltpH6ck2Kc