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And that’s basically it!
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.
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.
People are acting like it's not a problem, but if we have just one more downgrade of that magnitude, we'll be in big trouble
Yeah, at that magnitude loss one more and we'd only have tens of millions of years left.
does that mean I can quit my job and go on a hedonistic rampage?
I think everyone would be understanding about this today, even.
You're looking at 3 further drops of that magnitude for it to have any meaningful impact on anyone alive today. But if we do have 3 then yes, it's absolutely time to go apeshit.
Fuck. We have a lot less time than we thought.
Bit of a nonsensical headline if you refuse to read the article smh by head
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.
Humanity is more terminally unstable, so we win!
Now we compete to rank which humans are most unstable!
I feel like I'm going up the ranks quickly.
Humans are terminally unstable and will die within an average of 73 years. More at 11.
Still a few billion years? We'll turn it into a junkyard way before then.
A few billion years you say? Maybe about 5 Billion?
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 :).
Finally some good news.
Finally some good news.
Some 5 year old will hear about this and start panicking.
Right along with quicksand and the Bermuda Triangle
So do I hoard toilet paper?
Can’t make more if there aren’t any trees. Better stock up!
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."
Not soon enough, unfortunately.
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…
yup it would be an absolute beauty to see it!
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
No way! The Universe will one day not exist anymore? That's sick bro, you should tell some astrophysicists, they'd be shocked!
The Buddhist belief that nothing lasts forever has gained even more supporting evidence.
Let's just see if we get through 2026 first, guys.
Me too, solar system, me too.
Even if it was balanced wouldn't the orbits of the planets eventually decay anyways?
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.
Obviously though? Like that's entropy, it's fundamentally built in.
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.