admin The sun will kill us. Not soon, but it will kill us. Currently, the Sun continues to work by fusion of hydrogen into helium and other heavy elements, but in about 5 billion years it will run out of hydrogen. When that happens, the Sun will do its best to keep working by synthesizing helium. During this period, it will develop into a red giant, likely so large that it will engulf the Earth, enveloping the Earth in a warm and diffuse atmosphere.
Many people believe that if the Sun bulges out of Earth’s orbit, atmospheric drag will cause our tiny world to spiral toward the Sun. The inner solar system simply cannot survive the red giant phase of our star and will therefore eventually perish. But that may not be the case, as a new study published in the journal Nature suggests. , Astronomers in Hawaii have discovered a strange Jovian planet orbiting a red giant star. The planet, nicknamed Halla, orbits its star at a distance half the distance between Earth and the Sun.This in itself is not unusual. Astronomers have discovered many close-orbiting Jupiter planets, known as hot Jupiters. What makes Halla so unusual is that its star is in the later stages of a red giant phase.
Using data from the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS), the team confirmed that the star regularly burns helium in its core. This means that the star has passed its largest red giant stage and is in a stable phase before its core finally stabilizes to become a white dwarf. According to stellar models, during the transition from burning hydrogen to burning helium, the star’s radius will be 1.5 times larger than that of Halla’s orbit.
In other words, it seems like Halla is a world that has been swallowed up by its star and lives to tell its story.We don’t know how this could have happened. One idea is that the original world orbited farther away, and that during the red giant phase it moved closer to the star. Another reason is that as a gas giant, Halla can survive conditions that smaller planets like Earth cannot.
There are also other possibilities. The original red giant may have been a pair of stars, making Halla a world similar to Tatooine. Merging two stars can bypass the big red giant phase, meaning Halla was never swallowed by the star. Another opinion is that Halla is actually a very young planet. The merger of two stars may have created a cloud of gas surrounding the merged star, from which Halla formed. We do not have enough observational data to rule out any of these situations.
Earth might still be doomed. But this discovery suggests that isn’t a certainty. Life on Earth will be gone long before our planet’s end of days, but it is possible our world can still survive a journey through a stellar hell and back.
