We all had such high hopes that our planet would survive the ultimate destruction of our Sun. Alas, thanks to new research it has been shown that when our Sun does go to wherever dead stars go to, the planet Earth will follow.
Dr Robert Smith, Emeritus Reader in Astronomy of the University of Sussex, and his team had previously calculated that our planet would escape ultimate destruction. Granted, that “escape” would consist of being burnt to a crisp, but escape nonetheless.
However those previous calculations failed to take in to account the drag effect that would be exerted over our planet by the expanding outer atmosphere of the dying Sun.
"We showed previously that, as the Sun expanded, it would lose mass in the form of a strong wind, much more powerful than the current solar wind,” said Smith. “This would reduce the gravitational pull of the Sun on the Earth, allowing the Earth's orbit to move outwards, ahead of the expanding Sun.
"If that were the only effect the Earth would indeed escape final destruction. However, the tenuous outer atmosphere of the Sun extends a long way beyond its visible surface, and it turns out the Earth would actually be orbiting within these very low density outer layers. The drag caused by this low-density gas is enough to cause the Earth to drift inwards and finally to be captured and vaporized by the Sun."
Now, let’s be clear; this is all going to be happening about 7.6 billion years from now, so life on Earth damned well better have managed interstellar travel or genetic evolution. If we haven’t by that point, we don’t deserve to be around.
But even if we were still living on planet Earth, there is still a glimmer of hope for surviving the death of our star (even though, without our star, it would seem we wouldn’t have any heat, and thus we’d … never mind).
Back at the end of 2001 a trio of astronomers created a method for expanding Earth’s orbit away from the Sun’s dying reaches. Fred Adams of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and Greg Laughlin and Don Korycansky of the University of California at Santa Cruz had been studying how the orbits of planets were changed over long periods of time.
What they found was that over a period of billions of years, there is a chance, remote, yet a chance that the gravity of a passing star could dislodge Earth from its current orbit around Sol. This led them to thinking what would the chances be of manufacturing such an orbital shift.
According to a New Scientist report from the time, NASA has already tweaked the Earth’s orbit a few times. By using Earth as a gravity whip for satellites such as Cassini, miniscule shifts have been created. Naturally, moving our planet enough to save us would require much larger objects.
Thus, the trio suggested using objects from the Kuiper belt – the asteroid belt that orbits out past Neptune and Pluto. Believed to be the source of some of the objects that plunge in to our inner solar system, the Kuiper belt is made up of close to 100,000 giant balls of ice, thought to be 100 kilometers across or larger. The theory goes that, if we were to engineer them – using attached nuclear fusion engines – to enter in to the inner solar system via a particular path, we could have them swing past Earth and give us continual pulls away from the Sun.
By removing us so far away, one would assume that we would begin to suffer from a lack of heat. However considering that the trio was working on a time schedule consisting of 6.3 billion years, the Sun will have already brightened 2.2 times what it is today; thus, it would average out.
"This sounds like science fiction," says Professor Smith. "But it seems that the energy requirements are just about possible and the technology could be developed over the next few centuries." However, it is a high-risk strategy - a slight miscalculation, and the asteroid could actually hit the Earth, with catastrophic consequences. "A safer solution may be to build a fleet of interplanetary 'life rafts' that could maneuver themselves always out of reach of the Sun, but close enough to use its energy," he adds.
Either way, I’m going to rest easy in the knowledge that my family tree will probably have ended long before these problems begin to manifest themselves as “critical.”
Joshua Hill, a Geek’s-Geek from Melbourne, Australia, Josh is an aspiring author with dreams of publishing his epic fantasy, currently in the works, sometime in the next 5 years. A techie, nerd, sci-fi nut and bookworm.
