What will our sun look like after it dies? Scientists have made predictions about what the last days of our solar system will look like and when they will occur. And we humans won’t be around to see the veil of the Sun. Astronomers previously thought the Sun would transform into a planetary nebula—a bubble of glowing gas and cosmic dust—until evidence suggested it had to be slightly larger. An international team of astronomers reversed it again in 2018 and found that the planetary nebula is indeed the most likely solar body.

The age of the Sun is about 4.6 billion years, relative to the age of other objects formed at the same time in the Solar System. Based on observations of other stars, astronomers estimate that it will reach the end of its life in about 10 billion years. In the meantime, of course, there are other things to come. In about 5 billion years, the Sun will turn into a red giant. The star’s core will shrink, but its outer layers will expand to orbit Mars, swallowing our planet in the process. If it’s still there.

One thing can be said for sure: we’ll be gone by then. In reality, humanity has only 1 billion years left if we do not find a way out of this abyss. This is because the Sun’s brightness increases by about 10 percent every billion years. It doesn’t sound like much, but an increase in brightness will lead to the end of life on Earth. Our oceans will evaporate, and surface water will become too hot to form. We will be as strong as we can be. It is what comes after the red giant that is hard to detect. Several previous studies have found that the first star must be twice as massive as the Sun to form a bright planetary nebula.

However, a 2018 study used computer simulations to determine that, like 90 percent of other stars, our Sun will most likely shrink from a red giant to a white dwarf, and then become a planetary nebula.

“When a star dies, it ejects a mass of gas and dust known as its envelope into space. The mass of the envelope may be half the mass of the star. This shows the star’s core by this point in the star’s lifespan, which runs out of fuel, eventually shutting down, and before its eventual death,” explains Great Britain. astrophysicist Albert Zijlstra of the University of Manchester in paper.

“But then the hot core causes the ejected crust to glow brightly for about 10,000 years – a short time in astronomy. This is what makes the planetary nebula visible. Some are so bright that they can be seen from a great distance – tens of millions of light-years, where the star He’s too pale to even see himself.”

The data model the team created actually predicts the life cycle of different types of stars to determine the brightness of a planetary nebula associated with different stellar masses. Planetary nebulae are relatively common in the observable universe; notable include the Spiral Nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Ring Nebula, and the Bubble Nebula.

They are called planetary nebulae not because they actually have anything to do with planets, but because they looked like planets to the telescopes of the time when they were first discovered by William Herschel in the late 18th century. Almost 30 years ago, astronomers noticed something strange: the brightest planetary nebulae in other galaxies all have approximately the same luminosity. This means that, in theory at least, astronomers can calculate how far away they are by looking at planetary nebulae in other galaxies. The data showed this to be true, but models contradicted this, which has plagued scientists since the discovery.

“Old, low-mass stars should produce planetary nebulae that are much fainter than younger, more massive stars. This has been a source of conflict for the past 25 years,” said Zijlstra. “Evidence shows you can get bright planetary nebulae from low-mass stars like the Sun, models say it’s impossible, anything less than about twice the mass of the Sun could cause the planetary nebula to be too dim to see it.”

The 2018 models addressed this issue by showing that the Sun has roughly the lower mass limit for a star capable of producing a visible nebula. Even a star with a mass of 1.1 times that of the Sun cannot form a visible nebula. On the other hand, larger stars that are 3 times larger than the Sun will create brighter nebulae. The predicted luminosity for all other stars in between is very close to that observed.

“Good result,” Zijlstra said. “We no longer have a way to measure the presence of billion-year-old stars in distant galaxies, an extremely difficult range to measure, we even found out what the Sun will do when it dies!” Source