When a small star like our Sun has finally begun to consume its necessary supply of hydrogen fuel, it first swells to frightening proportions to become what is known as a red giant star. This highly swollen, red-colored relic of a once small, bright Sun-like star swells to the point that, if surrounded by unfortunate inner planets, it will engulf them with its spreading, scorching… shells. hot outdoor sodas, consuming them. In June 2014, a team of astronomers announced at the American Astronomical Society’s summer meeting in Boston, Massachusetts, that they had spotted a particularly hungry species. red giant star who was about to snack on not just one, but twodoomed planets!
The two tragic worlds, nicknamed kepler-56b and kepler-56c they’re destined to be swallowed by their greedy parent star in a “short” time, by cosmic standards, that is. Both planets will perish in about 130 million and 155 million years, respectively.
“To our knowledge, this is the first time that two known exoplanets in a single system have a predicted ‘time of death,'” study lead author Dr. Gongjie Li told reporters on June 2, 2014. Dr. Li is from tea Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Mass.
He presented his study at a press conference held at the 224th meeting of the AAS.
the hungry star kepler-56 is in the process of transforming into a bloated, greedy red giant. It has already bloated to monstrous proportions, and is currently about four times the size of our Sun. As it ages, it will continue to expand outward. Not only will the crimson star grow, but its tides will grow more powerful, dragging its planets inward toward their final tragic fate.
Even before their star vaporizes them, the two planets will be subject to intense heating from their ever-increasing stellar parent. Their atmospheres, if present, will begin to evaporate, and the wretched planets themselves will be stretched into an egg shape by intense stellar tides.
Tea kepler-56 is much more than just a tragic example of what happens at the end of a small star’s life. main sequence (burning hydrogen) “life.” It also provides a haunting glimpse into the future of our own Solar System. In about five billion years, our Sun will also swell into an angry red giantinflating itself to frightful proportions, first engulfing Mercury, then Venus, and then possibly Earth.
sun on steroids
Our Solar System arose from the scrambled debris left over from the long-dead ancient nuclear fusion cores of previous generations of stars. Our Sun was born in a very cold, dense pocket, secreted within a huge dark interstellar molecular cloud. There are many such frigid clouds lurking in our great barred-spiral Milky Way, and they serve as the strange cradles for its fiery baby stars. Ultimately, the very dense pocket of star birth, embedded within the dark molecular cloud, composed mostly of gas but also containing a hint of dust, will collapse under the great weight of its own gravity to give birth to a bright new star. . In the secret depths of these huge, cold, dark clouds, thin, delicate strands of material gradually entangle and coalesce into clumps that grow over hundreds of thousands of years. So, he It happens: suddenly, the dense pocket is squeezed enough, by the crushing of gravity, to the point that the hydrogen atoms floating within it begin to fuse together. This lights the baby star’s fire, and it will continue to burn as long as the star is “alive”!
All 400 billion stars in our galaxy, including our Sun, were born this way: through the gravitational collapse of heavy bags embedded within dark, frigid molecular clouds. These billowing black clouds are scattered throughout our Milky Way galaxy, carrying within them the gas and dust of ancient generations of ancient stars that have long since vanished.
Our Sun is a middle-aged man, main sequence, rather ordinary little star. It was born about 4.56 billion years ago and appears to us in our daytime sky as a large and fiercely dazzling golden sphere. There are eight major planets, a multitude of moons and small moons, and a rich variety of smaller objects, both rocky and icy, revolving around our star, which inhabits the distant suburbs of a typical, if majestic, large galaxy.
However, In another 5 billion years or so, our Sun will be gone. Red giant! A star of the relatively small mass of our Sun “lives for about 10 billion years in the main sequence. At present, however, our Sun and stars like it, which are experiencing an active middle age, are still vibrant and bouncy enough to happily continue to burn hydrogen in their stellar furnaces as fuel. nuclear fusion. nuclear fusion progressively makes heavier atomic elements from lighter ones, in a process called stellar nucleosynthesis.
When our Sun, and other stars that are similar to it, have finally used up their necessary supply of hydrogen fuel, their appearance changes. Now they are old stars. At the heart of an ancient Sun-like star is a hidden core made of helium. The helium core is surrounded by a shell in which hydrogen is still fusing into helium. At this point, the shell begins to expand outward, and the core continues to expand, as the star grows older and older. At last, the helium core itself begins to wither under the heavy weight of its own mass, growing hotter and hotter until, finally, it becomes hot enough in the center for a new phase of helium to begin. nuclear combustion. In this new phase, helium fuses to form the even heavier atomic element, carbon. In another five billion years, our doomed star will have a tiny, fiery core emitting more energy than it currently does. The gaseous outer layers of our Sun will have turned red and puffy, and it will no longer be the beautiful, glowing golden ball we see lighting up our sky during the day. The old Sun, fiery red, swollen, will have become a red giant, with a frightful appetite that will make her make snacks for her children from the inner planet. The temperature at the surface of this raging, seething ball of crimson gas will actually be slightly cooler than the surface of our Sun today. This explains the relatively cold red tone, in contrast with a boiling, bright and much warmer yellow.
When our sun goes red giant it will still be warm enough to turn the icy inhabitants of the remote Kuiper belt–like dwarf planet Pluto and their related icy objects–in tropical paradises. However, this warm tropical haven of refuge will not last forever. The core of our aging and dying Sun will continue to shrink because it is no longer capable of spewing radiation as a result of the process of nuclear fusion–and it will have reached the end of that long stellar road, because all subsequent evolution will be determined solely by gravity. Ultimately, our Sun will shed its gaseous outer layers into the space between the stars, but its core will remain in one piece, and all of the Sun’s matter will eventually collapse into this tiny remnant object that is only the size of Earth. Our Sun will have undergone a radical change, and in its death throes it will have become a kind of stellar corpse known as white dwarf. This strange and dense relic of what was once our fiery, incandescent star will be surrounded by an exquisitely beautiful layer of expanding multicolored gases that were once its outer layers, called planetary nebula. planetary Nebula, surrounding white dwarfs, it got its strange name because early astronomers thought it resembled the planets Uranus and Neptune.
For now, our planet sits quite comfortably, albeit close, in cosmic terms, to the inner edge of our star. living area, where water can exist in a liquid state, and therefore life can evolve. Tea living area it will spread more and more as our Star shines more and more. Even now, it’s relentless, slowly growing ever more ominously, murderously bright. In about 2 billion years, if humans have managed to survive, the remnants of our species will be forced to flee our planet before our star vaporizes it. Mars will be the first choice for relocation, at least for a while. However, some 3,000 million years later, what is left of humanity will have to migrate again, because the Sun will be about to have a snack on that planet as well. The formerly icy moons of the outer planets may turn out to be havens, at this point, but, at this point, what’s left of our species had better know how to travel into interstellar space in search of exoplanets. Our Sun will howl in its outer layers and transform into a white dwarf with a terrifying and powerful gravitational pull. But before our star finally enters that good night, its outer layers will turn into that beautiful shroud of shimmering, glowing, multicolored gases, a planetary nebulasometimes called the “butterfly of the cosmos.”
The star that cannot eat only one
Unfortunately, both kepler-56b and kepler-56c they are considerably closer to their killer parent star than Mercury is to our Sun. kepler-56b orbits its star once every 10.5 days, while kepler-56c orbits every 21.4 days. Both doomed planets will therefore meet their unfortunate fate much faster than Mercury does in about 5 billion years. Dr. Li and her team calculated the evolution of both the size of the star (using the publicly available MESA code) and the orbits of the planets to predict when the planets will evaporate.
The sole survivor of what was once a planetary system will be kepler-56d, which is a gas giant planet orbiting in a 3.3 Earth-year orbit around its star. It will stand at a safe distance, while its two sister worlds pass into history.
Tea kepler-56 The planetary system is also famous for being the first “tilted” system sporting multiple planets to be seen. The inner planet sibling duo’s orbits are significantly tilted from their stellar parent’s equator. This turned out to be a surprise, because the planets are born from the same disk of gas and dust. (protoplanetary accretion disk) like the star, so they should orbit in nearly the same plane as the star’s equator, as the planets in our own Solar System do.
The team was able to better determine the tilt of these planets, compared to previous studies. The astronomers found that the most likely tilt was 37 or 131 degrees.
Dr. Li and her team also studied the inclination of the outer and much luckier planet and determined that its orbit is probably also tilted relative to its star. Future observations should help curious astronomers to characterize this interesting system and eventually explain how it managed to become so skewed.