Nothing in this world is forever, not even the sun in the sky. Recent research using data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia satellite has shed light on the ultimate fate of our sun, which will swell into a huge red giant, likely to swallow Earth, before dimming to a small, faint white dwarf.
From Gaia observations to astrophysical properties: the life of a star (Gaia Data Release 3)
Although astronomers have a good understanding of the life cycles of stars in general terms, the details of what temperatures stars reach and how long it takes them to transition from one life phase to another are still only vaguely understood . To get a better picture of overall stellar evolution, data from hundreds of millions of stars observed by Gaia have been collected and analyzed to gain a firmer understanding of what we can expect from the future of our own star.
The Gaia data include the spectra of a large number of stars, which show how light splits into different wavelengths and can relate a star’s chemical composition to its temperature. Stars generally stay around the same mass throughout their lives, but their size and temperature change considerably in different periods.
To understand the fate of our sun, researchers looked at stars similar to our sun in terms of mass and chemical composition, but of different ages. This gave them a plot of the likely past and future we could expect our sun to have.
“From this work, it is clear that our Sun will reach a maximum temperature at 8 billion years of age, then cool and increase in size, becoming a red giant star around 10- 11 billion years.” Writes the European Space Agency. “The sun will reach the end of its life after this phase, when it finally becomes a dim white dwarf.”
ESA also shared this infographic, which shows how different types of stars evolve over time:
Artist’s impression of some possible evolutionary paths for stars of different initial masses. IS IN
Identifying sun-like stars is useful in the search for habitable exoplanets, as sun-like stars could host Earth-like planets. It can also help us understand how typical or atypical our solar system is in a galactic context, said one of the researchers, Orlagh Creevey: “If we don’t understand our own sun, and there’s a lot we don’t know about it : How can we hope to understand all the other stars that make up our wonderful galaxy?
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