There’s roughly a billion years of planet Earth left
New research has given astronomers an idea of just how planet Earth will come to an end billions of years from now.
Astronomers discovered a distant planet with similarities to Earth. The distant body, which is about 4,000 lightyears away near the central bulge of the Milky Way, may once have been habitable and used to orbit its star just like our planet orbits the Sun.
However, when its star died, the planet ended up drifting out into the void of space.
The planet was discovered back in 2020, but it was only recently that astronomers at the University of California, Berkeley took another look at this planetary system using the Keck 10-meter telescope in Hawaii.
They found that the planet was orbiting a white dwarf star, which is the name given to the core of a star that has died.
Experts reckon that before the star’s death, the planet may have been similar to Earth, and could even have supported life billions of years ago.
Now though, the planet has become a rocky, barren wasteland after drifting out of its stars habitable zone, Space.com reports.
In around a billion years time, our sun will also die. Whilst humans will be long gone, the Sun will potentially engulf Earth as it balloons in size in its final stages.
There is a chance that Earth will survive if the shrinking mass of the Sun can widen the planet’s orbit enough.
Lead author of the University of California’s research, Keming Zhang, said in a statement: “We do not currently have a consensus whether Earth could avoid being engulfed by the red giant sun.
“In any case, planet Earth will only be habitable for around another billion years, at which point Earth’s oceans would be vaporized by runaway greenhouse effect – long before the risk of getting swallowed by the red giant.”
Co-author Jessica Lu, associate professor and chair of astronomy at UC Berkeley, said the Earth-like planet discovered by Keming is an example of a planet that “survived its host star’s red giant phase.”
The study was published in Nature Astronomy on September 26.
