The future of our solar system depends on what happens to the Sun. A new study now shows that the end will come sooner and with more violence than scientists once thought.
The research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, looks closely at the outer planets: Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Astrophysicists Konstantin Batygin and Jim Fuller from Caltech, with Fred Adams from the University of Michigan, questioned older models that said these giant planets would last for billions of years until a passing star disrupted them.
The new model suggests that, rather than losing mass slowly and smoothly as it becomes a white dwarf, the Sun will lose its mass in sudden, separate bursts.
The team ran 672 simulations based on these bursts to see how violent ejections of material would quickly change the orbits of planets over three billion years.
The results for the outer solar system were mostly bleak. In cases with large bursts, up to 96 percent of planetary systems became very unstable within three billion years after the Sun became a white dwarf.
Even more surprising, about 40 percent of systems saw violent scattering before the Sun finished losing its outer layers. This fast chaos cuts the outer solar system’s expected lifespan from a quintillion years to about one billion years.
These violent changes caused huge shifts in gravity and extreme events. In some simulations, whole planets were thrown out of the solar system. In others, Uranus and Neptune switched their orbits completely.
Sometimes, smaller bursts pushed some planets into stable, synchronized orbits. Still, the study shows that the Sun’s explosive end will quickly and dramatically change the structure of our whole solar system.