Final fate of our solar system

Q: What will be the final fate of Earth according to science?

Krishna: When the Sun runs out of fuel, it will become a white dwarf, exerting a huge gravitational pull that could suck our system into where it will be crushed, according to new research.

Stars have limited lifetimes, and someday our Sun will die and our planet will be swallowed by it before it becomes a white dwarf. Meanwhile, other planets in the solar system will be "crushed and ground to dust," a new study has found. According to researchers' model, when the Sun runs out of fuel, it will become a white dwarf, exerting a huge gravitational pull that could suck our system into where it will be crushed.

But there's no need to panic just yet, as the scientists say this will likely happen in around 6 billion years. 

The Earth will probably just be swallowed up by an expanding Sun, before it becomes a white dwarf. For the rest of the solar system, some of the asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter, and maybe some of the moons of Jupiter may get dislodged and travel close enough to the eventual white dwarf to undergo the shredding process.

Researchers investigated the fate of asteroids, moons and planets which pass close to the white dwarfs, by analysing transits, which are dips in the brightness of stars caused by objects passing in front of them.

Unlike the predictable transits caused by orbiting planets around stars are predictable whereas those caused by debris are oddly shaped, chaotic and disorderly.

“Previous research had shown that when asteroids, moons and planets get close to white dwarfs, the huge gravity of these stars rips these small planetary bodies into smaller and smaller pieces.”

Collisions between these pieces eventually grind them into dust, which finally falls into the white dwarf, enabling us to determine what type of material the original planetary bodies were made from.”

In this new research, scientists investigated changes in brightness of stars for 17 years, shedding insight into how these bodies are disrupted.

The study, published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society (MNRAS) focused on three different white dwarfs which all behaved very differently. This study also  shows that the behaviour of these systems can evolve rapidly, in a matter of a few years.

https://warwick.ac.uk/newsandevents/pressreleases/?newsItem=8a17841...

https://academic.oup.com/mnras/article/530/1/117/7642259