Our Solar System Is Terminally Unstable and Will Be Completely Destroyed, Study Finds
6 days ago by heliotrope to c/nottheonion
FTA:
The estimated lifespan of the outer solar system has been downgraded from 100 billion years to just a few billion years, according to a study that probed “terminal instability” during the Sun’s death.
FTA:
“Newton’s envisioned instability is real after all,” the team. “He was mistaken only about the perpetrator.”
The news isn't that the solar system will eventually collapse (the concept of entropy isn't new) but that the mass loss is not predictable and smooth and the impact of the irregular mass loss fucks with their orbit:
The recently measured white dwarf recoil demands asymmetric mass loss that is most readily attributed to discrete, independently directed ejections that impulsively perturb stellar motion.
Nope. One more downgrade like that and the collapse of the solar system will be 88 billion years in the past. It'll collapse before it even formed, and none of this mess will have happened in the first place. Come to think of it, that doesn't sound so bad. Since it precedes the big bang, that might help with damage limitation.
If an article's title doesn't make sense until after you read the article, then the title is meant to ensnare rather than inform. Aka click bait.
I feel like I'm going up the ranks quickly.
Still a few billion years? We'll turn it into a junkyard way before then.
That episode was wildly optimistic. Earth will be uninhabitable by humans in around 250 million years and the oceans will be boiled away by the sun in 1 billion.
...Unless we destroy it sooner ourselves, of course.
Didn’t they say in the episode that humans had long since left and it was preserved “as it used to be”. I would assume if they had a space station that could survive a supernova they’d have a way to make things fine on the surface.
If we stay around for another million years we may get to the point where we could increase the earth's orbit, allowing us to stay in the habitable zone for far longer.
Even that isn't going to necessarily help.
When the sun depletes all of the hydrogen in its core, gravity becomes the dominant force once again and it starts collapsing. Eventually, the temperature and pressure increase from that collapse will ignite helium fusion, but in the time between those two events, the core will have built up some amount of inertia, which means the collapse continues and overshoots the new equilibrium point. This means the temperature and pressure further increase, adding even more helium fusion to counteract it until the pressure generated from that fusion overcomes that inertia.
But this rebound will also be an overshoot, but this time pushing outwards, followed by a reduction in temp/pressure, reducing fusion, then another collapse once gravity overcomes that inertia, and it'll oscillate like that for some time.
The science isn't exactly certain about what specifically this will look like but I'd be surprised if it isn't "strip the atmosphere from the earth, even if it's already in the new goldilocks zone for once the sun eventually reaches equilibrium" levels of violence, possibly on each outward oscillation after that burst of higher fusion energy.
Oh, there's also still a huge amount of hydrogen in the outer layers that are collapsing with the core, suddenly being pushed on with the force of helium fusion, that can also ignite hydrogen fusion in the outer layers as it oscillates, adding even more energy, though this could act to dampen the oscillations, but it will still be violent in our direction.
My guess would be best case is humanity is forced to live underground for several million years, if we are able to tune energy gatherers properly to keep producing solar power but not get destroyed by those periodic mini novas.
Also, even if we can manage the heat from the increased radiation, the higher pressure solar winds might overcome our magnetic field during the new equilibrium anyways. There might not be a "goldilocks zone" at all, at least not for our planet, unless maybe we can supercharge our magnetic field, which might be possible since moving to another orbit is already a Type II civilization kind of thing (considering we can't just move our planet and expect everything to be fine with the rest of them, moving earth outwards will likely require doing something about the gas giants), so the rest of it might be trivial or solvable.
But it's fun and interesting to think about the details :).
True, if we somehow manage to not kill ourselves off it's possible we could change it or just leave the planet altogether.
250 million years.. you sir are an optimist...
As I said, that's if we don't do the job sooner.
Where does the 250 million number come from? Also, did they move the date on red giant state up from when I was a kid?? I thought we had 2-3 billion before then.
Greenhouse effect will make the planet too hot for us to survive way before then. The seas will boil away way before the red giant consumes the planet.
Huh, I never realized how late to the game of Earth habitability humanity was.
Finally some good news.
Some 5 year old will hear about this and start panicking.
Insert picture of Big Bird in front of a circle of sitting kids with wide eyes and a speech bubble: "... and after it swallows our entire planet whole, it will destabilize the outer planets, swallowing some of them and hurling others out into inter-stellar space where they will become rogue planets. It doesn't matter how many vegetables you eat or chores you finish, this eventuality is inevitable, which is today's word of the day!"
So do I hoard toilet paper?
Not soon enough, unfortunately.
Our sun is expected to become a red giant in 5 billion years, so that should help.
It's like my doctors say about various chronic conditions I have: "Don't worry, something else will get you before this becomes a major problem."
entropy, baby.

anyway we have no clue what will happen when we collide with Andromeda galaxy in a few billions year, Maybe nothing, maybe orbit will be screwed, we don't know. And the sun will go red dwarf or something anyway in a few billions year. We will all be dead
Can't be bothered to find a source, but I remember hearing (probably from a Vsauce video or something like that) that it won't really affect our solar system. Even colliding with another galaxy, the space between stars is so ridiculously fucking huge that the chances of a celestial body getting close enough to pull our planets out of Sol's orbit is functionally zilch. It'll still be one hell of a night sky though…
I think either way it's just speculation how things will be affected. Like space is big but it's also going to be chaotic af and remember that both galaxies have inner cores containing supermassive black holes and a higher density of stars, as well as both galaxies have satellite galaxies with their own cores that can join in on the chaos. Those black holes have high energy jets that they shoot off perpendicular to their accretion disc, which could get messed with as matter starts coming from all directions instead of generally falling in from the galactic disc.
Currently, the stars in both sets of galaxies have relatively stable stellar orbits and are moving together. The collision will affect those stellar orbits, not just increasing the number of rogue planets flying around out there but also the number of rogue solar systems, including a non-trivial number that will be flung from both galaxies.
No idea what would happen to us if our solar system was one of those. Do we need a galaxy or would it just make the night sky more boring to not be in one?
Am I just stupid? They reference this study then go into the origins of life on earth and completely ignore mentioning the study again. What the fuck is this article?
Ah, I see it now. What a surprise, absolutely nothing has changed besides what we think will happen when the sun collapses into a white dwarf.
Sensational clickbait trash.
Oh no! A few billion years!
/s
The Buddhist belief that nothing lasts forever has gained even more supporting evidence.
Let's just see if we get through 2026 first, guys.
Obviously though? Like that's entropy, it's fundamentally built in.
Without a sun you don't have a solar system, the sun was never ever going to survive another 10 billion years yet alone 100. What a pointless study to point out the bleeding obvious.
The headline isn't the timeline change but the mechanism change. The researchers used new data from observing the death of a star and applied that behavior to a simulation of our own solar system to see the impact.
Updating models based on new data isn't pointless, it's fundamental to science.
The article's title should've focused on what 2/3 of it are written for: the beginning of life on Earth.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the solar system has been diagnosed with terminal instability and has been given a mere six billion years to live.
Actually longer than before, I suppose. The sun isn't expected to last more than 4bn years anyway, not to mention the collision with Andromeda might screw the system before the sun does.
It is unlikely the “collision” with Andromeda will screw the system as the solar system is dominated by the Sun’s gravity.
If, yes, but unlikely.
The collision between the galaxies isn't even likely to cause any stars to intercept either galaxy. It likely won't affect us in that way, possibly in some other way I am unaware of, but not by stars colliding or getting too close.
There goes my dream of living 100 billion years...
You know, I think you're right to call out my pessimism. Perhaps I should look into being shot into being shot into outer space in a cryogenically sealed coffin so I can spend 100 billion years circulating the galaxy without worrying about such things.
What about your wife and kid? (TFS reference)
Terminal instability refers to the mechanism by which the outer planets will be destroyed: changes to the sun's mass will change the planets orbit in asymmetrical ways, which will cause the planets to interfere with each other's orbits, furthering and speeding up the instability.
Is SPF 50k good enough?
More like 5 billion years. Plenty of time to for us to wipe out all life on Earth on our own without the sun being involved. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if humans somehow manage to break the sun before it can go red giant. Humanity's capacity to fuck shit up simply cannot be overestimated.
Humanity will probably either wipe itself out in the next couple hundred years or last for a long ass time
Either we're going to get our shit together and start being caretakers of life, or we're going to end up like Venus
Even if modern society gets destroyed and we started over technologically, the easily accessed fossil fuels are significantly depleted. We might redevelop in a greener way by necessity, or even just find stability as preindustrial societies
Or we just get our shit together. We're going to have to do some terra forming if we want to return to comfortable Holocene conditions, we'll need to change how we live, but we're going to have to make some big adjustments soon no matter what we do. Hopefully we take that opportunity to grow as a species
This is the kind of headline you get when both astronomers and journalists are sleep deprived and the astronomers are grumpy about it.
Where are those Accelerationists when you need them?
Promise?
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@lemmy.world
We're not The Onion! Not affiliated with them in any way! Not operated by them in any way! All the news here is real!
Posts must be:
Please also avoid duplicates.
Comments and post content must abide by the server rules for Lemmy.world and generally abstain from trollish, bigoted, ableist, or otherwise disruptive behavior that makes this community less fun for everyone.
And that’s basically it!
go to feed...
I mean when you make it as arbitrary as possible. The universe is terminally unstable and will be completely destroyed. Bit of a nonsensical headline without timelines.
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