Nothing in this world lasts 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 eventual fate of our sun, which will swell to become a huge red giant that will likely engulf Earth before eventually dimming to a small , a 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, the specifics of what temperatures stars reach and how long it takes them to transition from one life phase to another are still only poorly understood. To get a better picture of overall stellar evolution, data on hundreds of millions of stars observed by Gaia were collected and analyzed to gain a better understanding of what we can expect for the future of our own star.
The Gaia data include the spectra of a huge number of stars, which show how light splits into different wavelengths and which can relate a star’s chemical composition to its temperature. Stars usually stay roughly the same mass throughout their lives, but their size and temperature change significantly at different periods.
To understand the fate of our sun, researchers looked at stars that are similar in mass and chemical composition to our sun, but of different ages. This gave them an outline of the likely past and future we can expect our sun to have.
“From this work, it is clear that our Sun will reach its maximum temperature at an age of about 8 billion years, after which it will cool and increase in size, becoming a red giant star at an age of about 10-11 billion years,” writes the European space agency. “The Sun will reach the end of its life after this phase, when it will eventually become a dim white dwarf.”
ESA also shared this infographic showing how different types of stars evolve over time:
Artist’s impression of some possible evolutionary paths for stars with different initial masses. ESA
Identifying sun-like stars is useful in the search for habitable exoplanets, because sun-like stars can host Earth-like planets. It could also help us understand how typical or atypical our solar system is in a galactic context, said one of the researchers, Orlag Creevey: “If we don’t understand our own sun – and there’s a lot we don’t know about it – how can we we expect to understand all the other stars that make up our wonderful galaxy.
Editors’ recommendations
Add Comment