Is this how the world will end? Scientists warn our dying sun will 'kick' the planets out into space - and it could happen 100 times sooner than previously thought

Scientists have revealed a chilling glimpse into our solar system's future, and it looks like doomsday might come a lot earlier than expected.

Once the sun reaches the end of its lifespan, it will undergo a dramatic transformation into a hot, dense object known as a white dwarf.  

In the past, experts believed that the planets' orderly orbits would outlive this final transformation by 100 billion years. 

However, new calculations suggest that our solar system will come to a chaotic end 100 times earlier.

Researchers now say that the planets will fall into dissorder just one billion years after the sun becomes a white dwarf, or in about 10 billion years from now. 

This is because the sun will die in a series of violent 'kicks' that will shake the solar system of its stable foundations.

Co–author Professor Jim Fuller, a theoretical physicist from Caltech, told the Daily Mail: 'We don't know exactly what will happen because the process is chaotic. 

'But our paper shows that at least one of the outer solar system planets will likely be ejected or collide with one another, soon after the Sun turns into a white dwarf.'

Like all stars, the sun is held in a careful balance between the crushing weight of its own gravity and the enormous explosive power of hydrogen fusion taking place in the core.

However, in about four or five billion years, the sun will burn through the last of its hydrogen fuel, and that balance will be upset with disastrous results.

Without hydrogen to burn, the star will start to fuse helium atoms instead, causing the outer layers to expand and cool – transforming into a huge red giant.

Over time, the dying star will begin to jettison its outer layers into space in clouds of dust and gas to leave behind a very dense stellar core known as a white dwarf.

In the past, scientists believed that this process would happen more or less evenly, with the sun ditching 46 per cent of its mass in a smooth, steady stream.

Although catastrophic for life on Earth, this gradual process wouldn't substantially change the solar system's centre of gravity, leaving the outer planets' orbits untouched.

Estimates suggest that the outer planets should be stable for at least 100 billion years.

The orbit of Uranus, meanwhile, was believed to be capable of remaining stable for a quintillion years, over 70 million times the current age of the universe.

However, data from the European Space Agency's Gaia orbital observatory now show that stars have a much bumpier road from red giant to white dwarf.

Professor Fuller says: 'The sun's mass loss as a red giant will proceed through discrete ejection events; similar to, but much larger than, coronal mass ejections.'

Researchers estimate that the sun will go through about 4,600 of these ejection events, each releasing about one 10,000th of its mass, the equivalent of 33 Earths.

Each one of these kicks will give the sun a small push in the opposite direction, like a spacecraft firing its thrusters, changing the sun's speed by about 23ft per second (7m/s).

If these bursts emerged evenly over the sun's surface, their overall effect would balance out.

However, since their distribution is random, these tiny pushes can gradually build up enough to knock the entire solar system off–kilter.

'Each one of these gives a small "kick" to the Sun, which causes the planetary orbits to become slightly eccentric,' says Professor Fuller.

'A series of these kicks builds up the eccentricity, which causes the planets to gravitationally interact with each other, eventually destabilising their orbits so that they crash into each other, or eject one another from the solar system.'

In their paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, the researchers ran 700 simulations of how the sun's mass loss could play out, including 45 of the most likely projections.

These showed that the orbits of the planets are likely to fall into chaos far sooner than had previously been expected.

In nearly 80 per cent of the most likely scenarios, the outer planets started crossing paths long before the sun has finished losing its outer layers.

In the worst–case scenarios, the outer planets would be wandering through each other's orbits by the time the sun has lost just 10 per cent of its mass.

More alarmingly, these simulations showed that at least one of the outer planets is likely to be jettisoned from the solar system altogether.

In nine out of 10 simulations, at least one of the gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, is flung out into space before the sun has completed its transformation.

In a few worrying simulations, Saturn was bounced out of the solar system less than a few million years after the sun started to lose mass.

The 'good' news is that all of this might not make much difference for the fate of life on Earth.

'The fate of the inner planets – Mercury, Venus, Earth – doesn't really change,' explains Professor Fuller.

'They will be swallowed by the Sun when it evolves into a red giant in about five to six billion years.'

Given that we probably won't be around to see the aftermath, these questions about the end of the solar system might seem a little far–fetched.

However, these discoveries actually have very important implications for our understanding of the galaxy.

Although they are exceptionally hard to spot, scientists are beginning to discover a staggering number of 'rogue planets' drifting in the cold expanse between the stars.

Scientists now believe that rogue planets may outnumber their star–bound counterparts six to one, meaning there could be trillions in our galaxy.

However, scientists are still trying to work out exactly where all these lonely planets could have come from.

According to Dr Fuller, the violent end of solar systems shown by his simulations could prove to be an 'important source of free–floating planets'

That means some of these rogue planets may have once peacefully orbited solar systems just like our own.