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Astronomers Say Dying Sun Will Engulf Earth
iamlucky13 writes "A minor academic debate among astronomers is the final fate of the earth. As the sun ages and enters the red giant stage of its life, it will heat up, making the earth inhospitable. It will also expand, driven by helium fusion so that its outer layers reach past the earth's current orbit. Previously it had been believed that the sun would lose enough mass to allow earth to escape to a more distant orbit, lifeless but intact. However, new calculations, which take into account tidal forces and drag from mass shed by the sun, suggest that the earth will have sufficiently slowed in that time to be dragged down to its utter destruction in 7.6 billion years. "
Wow...talk about global warming!
No Sigs!
All good things...
I'm going to hold my breath to prove it. Check this thread in 100 years for an update.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
But maybe replicating space organisms that live in the Oort cloud will come and put a protective membrane around the Earth before then slowing down the passage of time on Earth in relation to the rest of the galaxy so we can be united with other sentient beings in worlds connected to our own by giant arches poking out of the sea.
Ahh, Robert Charles Wilson, you Spin me right round.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Heck, 7.6 billion years is ok by me; Chun the unavoidable will have been at my elbow by then.
This is the way I was taught it would happen on astronomy shows from the 1980s. I don't get the big deal.
Spaceballs?
Oh shit, there goes the planet!
The government can't save you.
As long as I've been alive, this has been pretty much the inevitable conclusion. Was there a turnaround in the cocaine infested 80s perhaps that we missed, or have since forgotten?
By the way, this is even in New Zealand, waaaaaaay down at the bottom of the globe (not far enough down that we'd be safe from this, however)
The Mothership
This isn't news at all, in fact I haven't heard anyone say it would happen any other way. I think I have a "My First Picture Book of the Planets" that says the same thing.
And to find this out the day I discover my paxil/zoloft/venlafaxine does nothing.
Beer me.
In 7.6 bln years time frame there is a 99.9 probability of a massive object hitting Earth and melting the outermost solid shell.
Hmmm... a 7 digit user id... you must be old here.
Discovery Channel, History Chanel and National Channel all show the same scenario of the sun expanding to and past earth.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
Accelerate Earth to put it into a wider orbit. This will solve Global Warming and the Earth being swallowed all in one.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
If this is such an earth-shattering discovery, how come I read about it in Carl Sagan's COSMOS 20-odd years ago?
slow news day?
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
the copyright for a Beatles song?
Say hello to my little sig.
I guess that means our operating system clocks only need to work up until the year 7.6 billion.
Someone work out how many bytes are needed to represent that time.
If we honestly can't figure out how to correct the orbit of the Earth some 7.6 Billion years from now, we deserve a painful death.
I think our odds are pretty good though.
So what's the news?
And some of the academic references are actually a decade old: http://www.astronomy.ohio-state.edu/~pogge/Lectures/vistas97.html
This disaster can actually be compensated for to some degree by moving earths orbit further out from the sun using gravity assist. What you do is capture a large mass be it a comet or a large asteroid then put it in elongated orbit around earth. As the large mass now circling nears earth it pulls on the planet thus moving it ever so slightly. Few billions year later and earth has moved far enough out to avoid annihilation for a few extra billions years.
I'm 51 years old and I first saw this story in the Weekly Reader in 1st grade..... ( *grin* )
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
and the books were first published in the late 60's
for the Year of the Linux Desktop to occur before the world ends. Better get a move on though.
...humans will have destroyed it, and several others...
Considering that only half of scientific papers are true (recent slashdot article I can't find anymore) and that astronomers also were off by a factor of 2 in one of the dimensions of our galaxy (slashdot again), I think this story has a long time to wait before it's newsworthy.
After 7.6 billion years, it's time to move out of mom's basement.
Actually a dying Earth will engulf the Sun.
By the time any of this happens, humanity will either have ascended or descended to a point where it won't matter anyways.
I, for one, cannot wait to be information and energy without having mass.
By that time, mankind will be sufficiently advanced to relocate to an outer planet.....like Pluto.
What? Pluto isn't a planet anymore??
Oh No! We're doomed!!
Have gnu, will travel.
I read that stuff back in the 60's. And the sun's life expectancy was going to be around 9 billion years or so. Nobody was saying that the earth would escape.
What?
Avg. distance from Earth to the Sun (according to Wikipedia) = 1.496x10^11 meters
Current mass of the sun (according to Google) = 1.9889x10^33 grams
Current Diameter of the sun (according to Google) = 1.4x10^9 meters
Volume of a sphere = (4/3)(r^3)
Density = mass/volume
Based on that:
Volume of the sun = 6.465x10^27 cubic meters
Density of the sun = 3.076x10^5 g/m^3 or about 300 kilograms per cubic meter
However, in the future:
Volume of red giant sun = 7.889x10^33 cubic meters
Density of red giant sun = 0.25 g/m^3 or about 250 milligrams per cubic meter
Can that be right? Can fusion happen at such a low density? For comparison, the average density of the earth's Atmosphere at sea level (of course depending on many factors) is about 1.225 kg/m^3.
Or, more likely, are my numbers off? Can someone check my math?
Regardless, the sizes and such involved are difficult to imagine, aren't they? A sphere with a current radius of about 0.005 AU will expand to a sphere with a radius of 1 AU? Huge. Mind boggling. My head asplode.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
We must destroy the sun right now! Our survival depends on it! I think if we point a giant firehose at it, we should be able to at least slow down Earth's demise. Why is this not on Obama, Hillary's and McCain's agenda? Fuckers.
I, for one, welcome our new helium-filled, earth-devouring overlord!
Oops... Throw a "pi" up there into the Volume equation.
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
The ancients assumed (believed) the sun is a giant camp fire. Then Einstein came along with his famous equation and humans built a hydrogen bomb. So then the solar campfire was upgraded to a thermonuclear fire. That's what we assume (believe) today.
Thermonuclear reactions produce lots of neutrinos. However, the number of those little particles we actually measure and how many we should be measuring if indeed the sun is a giant controlled fusion reactor, is way different. The number we measure is far too small. There are some rather convoluted explanations for this, but it really still is very much a puzzle why we don't measure more neutrinos.
It has been pretty well established, that heat moves from the hotter to the cooler region. If the interior of the sun is hot enough for fusion (about 20-25 million deg) it is conceivable that by the time the energy gets to the surface, the temperature could have cooled to the 6000 degrees we measure there. Now how is it then that as we move away from the surface of the sun, to its corona, the temperature we measure rises to 3 million degrees?
According to the way heat normally behaves, it should get steadily cooler as the distance from the sun increases. If fusion is truly the source of the sun's heat, then somehow, the laws of thermodynamics are turned on their head or for some unknown reason don't apply to this situation with the sun.
Maybe, we still don't REALLY know what powers the sun. Which of course makes the whole article pure speculation.
All theory is gray
how long the human race will survive. (no smiley)
;-) )
While I have all my life shared the deep desire to know the "ultimate end" (if there even is such a thing), the more I pay attention the more I feel the cognitive resources spent on these kinds of calculations are almost shameful - the astrophysical equivalent of gunning down buffalo from the back of the train.
If we weren't trying to solve these problems I'd be the voice saying that we should. It was just that in a world of such instability, in reading this article I suddenly felt sad we were spending time figuring out what might happen in a few billion years, when so many of us desperately need to know simply how to survive tomorrow.
Wow, just writing that helps bring me back to balance (since my projective emotional response to something can only ever be a response to something inside me). Remembering my own personal priorities, with which I'd momentarily lost touch this evening, has me feel centered again. Thanks for giving me the opportunity to right myself...and for listening.
(P.S. My own thesis is that long before the 7.6E9 moment we'll have grown to be able experience ourselves as far more than we do now, not just as tiny elements at the effect of the cosmic turnings of the Sun and Earth, but at one with the entire Universe itself. And with that, time for bed...gotta survive tomorrow, too, you know.
In about 2 billion years the Milky Way could already collide with the Andromeda Galaxy, which will more than likely change earth's cozy equilibrium that enables human life in a sub-optimal way.
Uhmmm, next how about posting something that is actually news ok? I mean for fucks sake I learned this in grade school and that was over 35 years ago!/p
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
It has been reported from archeologists who have teleported from the future to our time that 7.59 billion years from now, Duke Nukem Forever is released to manufacturing.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
I'll be long dead by the time it happens, however it happens.
When speaking of planetary catastrophe the death of our Sun is but a distant worry. It has already been mentioned that in about 3 billion years the galaxy Andromeda will collide with our own Milky Way galaxy. That of course poses several dangers to Earth in itself, though none particularly likely due to the vast distances between stars within galaxies, the potential for a stellar marauder to interfere with our solar system and cause chaos for Earth does exist. More worrisome, though, is the fact that around the same time (3 billion years from now) the Earth's core will finally cool and it's magnetic field generating dynamo will shut down, causing the Earth's shielding from the solar wind to collapse and the atmosphere to be stripped away eventually leaving the planet as dry and barren as Mars. Well before that ever happens, Earth will have to deal with the solar system's bobbing and weaving in and out of the galactic plane, possibly exposing the planet to deadly cosmic rays. Even nearer to our future is the fact that a conveniently aimed gamma ray burst from an exploding star (Betelgeuse is ready to go any day now) could "sterilize" the planet. Then of course, there is the ever present threat of an Earth shattering asteroid impact, which happens every 100 million years or so on average... in which case you could consider Earth overdue for another one. So yeah... the Sun engulfing the Earth (or what's left of it) 7 billion years from now... I wouldn't sweat that one.
In fact, he was billions and billions of years ahead of his time. He was more ahead of his time than there are grains of sand on all the beaches on the earth....
The problem with quotes on the internet, is that nobody bothers to check their veracity. -- Abraham Lincoln
7.6 billion years is way enough time to save up money to build my spaceship. I've started a spaceship fund, I will put $1 in it every year for 7.6 billion years! :D
Weaksauce as they say...
Considering our galaxy should collide with the Andromeda Galaxy in about 3 billion years, I think it may be a moot point. Since there is a good chance the earth nor the sun may be still around, or may not be near each other of if passing gravity fields toss the planets out of their orbits, etc.
According to the professor who taught my astronomy class, the Earth's climate will be tipped into thermal runaway, like Venus, long before the Sun becomes a red giant. Solar output increases steadily as the Sun ages. It's only a matter of time, like a few billion years, before it overwhelms the Earth's ability to regulate its temperature.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
How in the Hell is this NEWS?! Astronomers have known about this for DECADES!
What's next? An article telling us gasoline is flammable?
Somebody please tag this noshitsherlock.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I thought it said 7.6 million at first.
I mean, sure, the sun "looks" larger but is it really?
I've got 10 industry funded studies that says it's an optical illusion.
Yes, it has long been known that the sun would expand beyond the present-day orbit of the earth. But this is asking what would happen to the earth's orbit in that time. Would the decaying mass of the sun allow planet earth to escape? That seemed like a likely scenario. The maths presented here suggest that the earth would be caught in the tenious outer atmosphere of the decaying sun, where friction would slow it down and it would be captured.
Still, as others have noted, the Milky Way and Andromeda galaxies will pass through each other in some 2 billion years. Is there a young star with our name on it, calmly stabilising, ready to snatch us away from our then elderly sun? There is also a large cloud of hydrogen heading our way, with a similar timeframe. What is that going to do?
Time will tell.
Prediction for end of Universe #42: Fencepost error in Quantum_bogosort.cpp
Sure, he wont let that happen.
I'm not sure how big of a difference it would make to you... :)
I sure hope they figure this out soon.
Should I spend a bunch of money to freeze my corpse for later revival, or would I just be throwing that money away?
When all you have is an axe, everything looks like a grindstone.
We will either destroy ourselves before this happens, or our technology will give us a choice of many solutions to the problem (one of them undoubtedly involving CoyboyNeal).
Help fight spam
Someone tell B.W. Bush he needs to invade the sun to get rid of its WMDs.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
While I don't believe the singularity will happen in 20 years, it's reasonable to believe it'll happen in less than 1,000 years.
Thus, in a couple billion years, we can either download our minds into probes or we'll have been replaced by robots or something like that. In any case, clinging to a physical existence will be considered highly overrated.
Or we'll just have killed ourselves off in some way and some other species can scratch their heads about it. 70-something million years for mammals to evolve into us? There's time for at least 50 such cycles.
thegodmovie.com - watch it
>A minor academic debate among astronomers is the final fate of the earth.
I don't know, but I bet the Cylons will have something to do with it.
Sun to Earth: Haha, die in a fire. Earth: Come back in 7.6 billion years, n00b.
No portion of this post may be rebroadcast without the express, written consent of Major League Baseball.
At least this way, all that plastic garbage we've churned out finally gets recycled.
But is "Disaster Area" going to be playing live during the finale? /me puts on my peril sensitive glasses
We burned the religious fanatics.
With their help of course.
The Elements according to Aristotle: Air, Earth, Water and Fire.
So, I take it that Fire will melt too. Hmmm, interesting concept.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Sure, but not in Kansas.
"As it was in the beginning (~6000 years ago), now is and always will be, world without end."
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
start the sun on a low-carb diet
Table-ized A.I.
By this time if humans have not established self sufficient colonies around many different stars they deserve to die out.
This is a test. This is the only test.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
The solar corona problem isn't tied to fusion per se, just to a very hot core cooling radially outward. Also, there aren't any problems with thermodynamics in this situation provided there is some mechanism that is adding energy to the plasma at the solar surface. Given the violent nature of the solar surface, particularly with respect to solar flares and coronal mass ejections, there are certainly energy generating processes going on, so it isn't too terribly surprising that the corona gets heated up. The big question is what process(es) are causing it. For what it's worth, magnetic reconnection is the main suspect.
Back in the 60's or so they figured out the whole red giant phase of stellar evolution and realized the sun would expand to about the diameter of the earth's present orbit when it reached this point. It was a fascinating bit of trivia for Carl Sagan and the common folk to pass around that the sun would engulf the earth, but further investigation showed the sun would likely lose something like 30% of it's mass as heat from helium fusion blew away the outer layers (a process that looks really freaking cool from a distance). This would cause the earth, due to conservation of its orbital energy, to assume a much larger orbit...about as far out as Mars is today.
Therefore the popular notion was thought by many astronomers to be wrong. But in fact, nobody had ever done a really detailed model of the process until the subject of this article. It turns out, the professionals were wrong, and the common folk were correct, if only because we were a couple decades behind the times academically.
If you don't believe me, here's the archived wikipedia page for earth from last Friday. It's since been updated.
This is the most informed and educated post I have seen on slashdot for some time.
Mod parent up! Long before solar expansion is an issue the earth will have been struck by extinction level asteroids multiple times.
This is a test: Escape your planet of origin or die out. End test.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Somehow a 30+ years piece of info isn't really news. I was taught this in grade school back in the 70s. Come on, try something that's not older than half your audience...
The last human watches the Earth get destroyed from a nearby spacestation, before getting roasted by The Doctor.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
"A minor academic debate among astronomers is the final fate of the earth" - in 7 billion years.
However, a major debate is the final fate of the Universe - will it expand indefinitely, leading to the thermal death? Or it will be crushed together by the force of gravity, in a reverse of the Big Bang? This might take a little longer than 7 billion years
Science may cure death for the few. For the many is a more difficult question.
If your estate can sustain your corpse reliably for 200 years then improvements in medical science can be a fair bet. If your estate can endow a foundation to provide for your arousal then it is closer to a sure thing. Nothing is certain though. In 40 years the concept of ownership of property can vary considerably.
In the term TFA is speaking of nothing can save you on this planet. Y(our) only hope is to escape this solar system entirely.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
So this means that earth is in it's late 30s then (relatively speaking)? Another billion years then before it's over the hill. So when do we get out the black hats and balloons? The point of this theory is to say we do not have to worry about this ever happening to humans. Oh no, we'll probably kill each other before the party even begins.
How do they determine the boundary between the sun's "surface" and the space around it?
"Empathise with stupidity, and you're halfway to thinking like an idiot." - Iain M. Banks
unless we kill ourselves before that, I believe we'll equip Earth with good hyperdrive and sail to greener pastures.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Hi, thanks for teaching us what we've learned in school already. Much appreciated.
All life on earth gone in one billion years, the single most crucial issue facing the earth and I haven't heard one politician stating what they intend to do about it.
Politicians must get behind the urgent job of colonising new planets, and given the journey times this should be ready to roll by half time, otherwise we'll end up in a last 500 million year rush, as usual.
Buggar.
Thats how you do it. Build a solar powered mass driver on the moon then fly it out of Earth orbit and position it ahead of the Earth so that the thrust from the mass driver offsets gravitational pull from Earth. Over millions of years the two planets accelerate away from the sun. Problem solved.
Larry Niven had something similar in A World out of Time, but using Uranus or Neptune as a hydrogen fueled tug to reorganise the solar system. But I think the other gas giant had been dropped into the sun using the same technique which caused a bit of premature ageing.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
the core of the Sun is more like 15 million degrees.
the coronal heating problem simply means the mechanism responsible for the increased temperature is a non-equilibrium process. the corona is also a near-vacuum so despite its high temperature there is relatively tiny amount of energy there.
In the Grim Darkness of the Far Future there is Only Us getting eating by the frackin' sun.
...if I time it just right I'll get 14 more days then the rest of you suckers!
Bwahahahahahahaha...
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
and thanks for all the fish!
So say we all
Humanity will die a hell of a lot quicker than the planet so why should we care if the sun engulfs the Earth? It won't be our problem...
It was not done by American scientists. I refuse to recognise it.
Now, how can we use this to increase our grip on the world.....?
You could place a brown paper bag over your head and lie down or something...
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
I doubt Chuck N. will allow this happen to our homeworld
doesn't mean there isn't one.
As an astrophysicist at university, I knew there was a good chance that the earth would be saved as a cold rock because the gravitational potential energy of a smaller sun would mean our kinetic energy would give us a wider orbit.
Nobody had done a simulation of which would come first: enough mass ejecta and orbital stability or the red giant phase.
Looks like the red giant will come first.
We learnt this in science in the 80s. It's probably older news than that. So what if there is a new calculation, does 7 billion years away really matter?
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
Will we be around in some form to see this, or would we have killed ourselves off by that point? I guess it's plenty of time to get off this rock, and mess up another one.
Ubuntu- Linux for human beings.
It may increase the total energy output, or transfer more energy to the planets, heating THEM up, but Sun itself will cool down.
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
"You can wake up now, the universe has ended. " rebel w/o a cause
cult. Blind obedience is the only path to salvation! Repent sinner!!!
If evolution is a myth, what chance does gravity have? It is also, after all, only a theory.
"Evil will always triumph over good, because good is dumb." - Dark Helmet (Spaceballs)
In about 3 billion years our Milky Way galaxy will be merging the Andromeda Galaxy: http://www.galaxydynamics.org/tflops.html With the the expect rain of gamma rays and shock wave clouds from supernova that expected to be going at the rate of several per year, or the tidal forces from star passing through the solar system, the Earth might be freed from the solar grasp, if not totally destroyed in the process. Of course there might the more quiet possibility that solar system could be lucky enough to be flung out of the galaxy by slingshot to await the sun's bloat 4 billion years later.
"Just remember, it takes a village idiot." -- The Motley Fool.
If that 7.6 billion year figure is correct, 3D Realms will just miss their delivery window.
I'm sure we can get the future equivalent of a redneck in his 4x4 Pickup Shuttle to hook a tow wench to Earth and pull it out a bit further.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
So we have only 7 million years to live?
Oh wait, you said 7 billion.. nevermind then.
factor 966971: 966971
What's the CowboyNeal option?
Use your head, can't you, use your head,
You're on earth, there's no cure for that - S. Beckett
I wonder how many bits are needed to represent 7.6 billion years since UNIX Epoch ?
I'm wearing shorts to work THAT day.
The sun brightens over hundreds of millions of years. Anthropogenic climate change happens over tens, hundreds, or thousands of years. By the time the sun gets brighter to any noticeable degree, we won't be here to notice it.
Ooh, moderator points! Five more idjits go to Minus One Hell!
Delendae sunt RIAA, MPAA et Windoze
Don't bogart that shit!
Unless there are some revisions in the laws of physics, the nuclear processes throughout stellar evolution are well known based on computer models.
When helium "ash" accumulates in the core, helium fusion is not the next thing that happens. The core starts contracting and heating up, but that lights off H2 fusion in the shell surrounding the core. That phenomenon changes the luminosity and heat transfer rates of the star, causing the outer atmosphere to swell up into the red giant stage.
When shell burning runs its course, again the core contracts and heats up some more, resulting in the helium flash. Based on computer models, the helium flash is a major disruptive event caused by the sudden onset of helium fusion, it does not cause the star to go nova or anything, but it causes the star to change modes as it were, becoming somewhat bluer and smaller, but still more luminous than Main Sequence. From the computer models, it is believed that the upper-righthand HR diagram stars, red giants, are H2 shell burners while the horizontal branch above the Main Sequence represents He core burners.
For a massive enough star, exhaustion of core He will initiate shell He ignition, sending the star back into the red giant range, perhaps as a red supergiant for a massive star.
The red giant phase is only one phase of an evolved star. Everyone just kind of assumed that a star that goes supernova would be a red giant, but it seems like the star that popped off in Supernova 1987a in the LMS was blue.
According to what I've read and seen on TV, the core of the Earth will solidify at some point before the Sun turns to a Red Giant. Once that happens, Earth will look roughly like what Mars looks like. Don't bother trying to move the planet, it won't help.
Aww man...i was going to freeze myself for 7.7 billion years. Now what am i going to do?!
I was told this in 3rd grade (1985) ... why is this here? Did they reconfirm the same thing that they knew 20 years ago? This is sort of like the studies that confirm eating too much makes you fat.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
What a relief, I thought the Earth would be destroyed in 7.5 Billion Years!!!
I mean, over the next several billion years, there's absolutely nothing that could change to alter our calculations!!
This is going to make it a little harder to sell the house.
"However, new calculations, which take into account tidal forces and drag from mass shed by the sun, suggest that the earth will have sufficiently slowed in that time to be dragged down to its utter destruction in 7.6 billion years. "
A poor time to be a Highlander.
I already have my Sub-Etha Signalling Device and towel ready for the Vogon fleet that was supposed to destroy the earth and now this happens.
Anybody know if i can get a refund from Sirius Cybernetics?
I was pretty worried, for a minute. And then I realized that I misread the article as 7.6 MILLION years. 7.6 billion? No sweat.
7.6 billion years? For a minute, I thought you said 7.6 million years.
Words can't express my relief.
I read exactly the same thing in one of the very excellent series of childrens' science books, The Golden Book of Astronomy. It had things wrong, such as the moon forming from a bulge in the then molten Earth, but I remember quite distinctly the fate of the Earth being swallowed up by the expanding sun as it went red giant. I've read the same countless times ever since.
/. article on bad science reporting. If it's a bad science story in the media, it'll be misquoted to increase its FUD value on /.
Yet another example of the sort of science non-story listed in the recent
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
Since these only last minutes, wouldn't only half the earth (ok, +duration.minutes/(24*60)) be sterilized, the back face being spared the direct blast?
They thought for a little while that the Earth might just make it, but now it's pretty clear to everybody that's not going to happen.
OK, so the earth will apparently orbit under the "surface" of the eventual red dwarf rather than above it.
So what?
I was under the impression that the outer regions of a red dwarf are REALLY tenuous - more like a solar wind that happens to include some low-velocity excited neutral atoms that glow as they rise to a limited altitude and then fall back.
Do these atoms deposit enough heat by conduction and radiation to heat the planet's surface to a similar red glow? Or are they (as I had thought) a minor nuisance - something like trying to warm yourself by the light from a neon sign?
I Am Not An Astrophysicist. So what's the story?
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Is that on a thursday ? Cause I've kinda laid plans....
--- Robert Frost
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Except when we all die in 2035 from the asteroid.
~Vexed and loving it!
Wait didn't we already know this? Doesn't everyone here watch Doctor Who?
"Did you say million or billion?"
"I said billion."
"Oh! I am relieved."
Egad, I hope not! That's where I keep all my stuff!
Moving to Mars won't work.
You have been misinformed, yet again.
RR
Hello...
/. day?
I heard and read all this shit 50+ years ago, when I was a teenager.
What is this- a slow
Grrr... In Soviet Earth, we will swallow SUN!
I, for one, bow... awww... fuck it.
.
- aqk
F U
I know it's too late to stop this BS global warming, or for that matter the entropic solar cooling- but AFAIConcerned, the Earth is a pretty damn inhospitable place now!
/.ers? Lets have a vote!
.
- aqk
F U