Earth to be burnt to a crisp when the sun swells to 100 times its current size: scientists

EARTH will be decimated in a nightmarish inferno as the sun balloons to 100 times its normal size, scientists predict.

Planet Earth could be burned to a crisp with all humanity wiped out in about five billion years, scientists in Belgium predicted. Picture: NASA

EARTH could be burnt to a crisp with all humanity wiped out in about five billion years, scientists in Belgium have predicted.

The New York Post reports the sun is expected to grow to 100 times its current size by then, wipe out life here and suck in and destroy its two closest neighbours, Mercury and Venus, stargazers said.

“Five billion years from now, the sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size,” said Professor Leen Decin, from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy.

A composite view of L2 Puppis in visible light (from the VLT/SPHERE instrument, blue colours) and ALMA continuum (orange colours). The central star light has been subtracted from the ALMA image to better show the companion object. Picture: P. Kervella et al/CNRS /U. de Chile/Observatoire de Paris/ LESIA/ESO/ALMA

But then two billion years later, the sun will shrink into an incredibly dense “dwarf star.”

“It (the sun) will also experience an intense mass loss through a very strong stellar wind. The end product of its evolution, seven billion years from now, will be a tiny white dwarf star,” Professor Decin continued. “This will be about the size of the Earth, but much heavier: One teaspoon of white dwarf material weighs about five tonnes.”

A schematic view of the candidate planet’s orbit in L2 Puppis disk. Picture: P. Kervella/CNRS/U. de Chile/Observatoire de Paris/LESIA

Despite the grim fate of Mercury and Venus, there’s still a (very) slim chance of survival for those on the third rock from the sun, scientists said.

“But the fate of the Earth is still uncertain,” Professor Decin said. “We already know that our sun will be bigger and brighter, so that it will probably destroy any form of life on our planet. But will the Earth’s rocky core survive the red giant phase and continue orbiting the white dwarf?”

Scientists based their findings on stars they’ve been eyeballing from Earth, about 208 light years away, via the super-powerful Alma radio telescope.

ALMA is the world’s largest observatory at millimetre wavelengths and is installed on the high-altitude plateau of Chajnantor in the Atacama desert in Chile). Picture: ALMA/ESO/NAOJ/NRAO

The scientists studied a star that’s a near-match of our solar system’s sun.

“Five billion years ago, the star was an almost perfect twin of our sun as it is today, with the same mass,” Institute of Astronomy professor Ward Homan said.

“One-third of this mass was lost during the evolution of the star. The same will happen with our sun in the very distant future.”

This story originally appeared in The New York Post and has been republished here with permission.