Science Reveals Fate of Earth After Our Sun Dies

'Stellar death is not the end': James Webb Space Telescope glimpses the fate of the solar system in a weird exoplanet orbiting a dead star

Astronomers have used the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) to observe an oddball gas giant exoplanet orbiting a dead star, a white dwarf, located some 80 light-years away. This "life after death" system gives scientists a portentous vision of what the solar system may look like in around 6 billion years after the sun has exhausted the hydrogen in its core, shed its outer layers, and left behind a smoldering white dwarf stellar remnant. Prior to…

Science reveals fate of Earth after our sun dies

A new study gives fresh insight into what happens to planets after the death of their star.

The sun's violent death could look like this

The sun still has a long life ahead of it, say five billion years or so. But our star is still on borrowed time. When its inevitable end arrives, the sun’s core will exhaust the last traces of hydrogen fuel and kick off the first stellar death pangs. At that point, our yellow sun will start swelling into a red giant star about 100 times its current size. Over the next one to two billion years, its outer layers will begin shedding as it transitio…

Discovery of Post-Apocalyptic Planet Suggests Earth May Survive The Sun's Death

Of all the strange worlds in our Milky Way galaxy, some of the most mysterious are those hanging around white dwarf stars. These are not regular stars busy smashing atoms in their cores, but the ultra-dense remains of Sun-like stars that have undergone their death sequences – puffing up into enormous red giants before shedding their outer layers and collapsing into dense stellar cores. This is what is going to happen to the Sun in about 5 billio…

University of St Andrews scientists discover what will happen when our sun dies

WD 1856 b circles the burnt-out core of a dead star at a distance that seems almost impossible. The giant planet skims around a white dwarf in just 1.4 days, far too close to have survived if it had always lived there, and now Webb has helped explain why. The world, about 80 light-years from Earth, is roughly the size of Jupiter but travels around a host star only about as large as Earth. That mismatch makes the system striking on its own. As le…