Earth's magnetic shield is not always strong enough to protect our planet. The solar wind will get stronger when the star at the center of the Solar System finally dies. When that happens, scientists do not call the apocalypse the end of everything, but rather that new life will appear on a new planet.
In a study published July 21, 2021 in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, a team of astronomers calculated how the intensity of the solar wind will evolve over the next 5 billion years, when our star runs out of hydrogen fuel energy to burn and swell into a giant. awesome red.
At that time, the solar wind will become so strong that it will erode the Earth's magnetic shield until it is completely gone. After that, most of our planet's atmosphere will be blown out into space. Any life on Earth that managed to survive until then, would be wiped out.
"We know that the solar wind in the past eroded the Martian atmosphere. Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a large-scale magnetosphere to protect it," said study co-author Aline Vidotto, an astrophysicist at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland.
"What we didn't expect was that future solar winds could damage planets, including those protected by magnetic fields like Earth," he continued, as quoted from Live Science, Wednesday (15/9/2021).
Earth's apocalypse and new life
Billions of years from now, our Sun, like all the stars in the universe, will eventually run out of hydrogen fueling the nuclear reactions in its core. Without this fuel, the Sun's core would begin to contract under its own gravity, while the outer layers of the star would begin to expand. Eventually, the Sun will become a huge red sphere whose radius extends millions of miles beyond its current boundaries.
As the Sun's outer atmosphere expands, it will penetrate every planet in its path. Mercury and Venus will almost certainly disappear and Earth will likely too. After a billion years or so of expansion, the Sun will collapse and then dwarf. This is the last breath of the Sun until later it will faintly smolder for several billion years until finally it can only blink completely.
Based on the magnetosphere model, each planet is always 'crushed' by the intensity of the solar wind. The only way for a planet to maintain its magnetic field throughout the entire course of a stellar evolution is if it had a magnetic field 100 times stronger than Jupiter's today, or 1,000 times stronger than Earth.
"This study demonstrates the difficulty of a planet maintaining its protective magnetosphere across phases of the giant branch of stellar evolution," said study lead author Dimitri Veras, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in the UK.
As a result, apart from being a reminder that life on Earth will end, this research has implications for the search for life beyond Earth. Some astronomers think that white dwarfs have the potential to host habitable planets in their orbits, in part because these 'dead' stars do not produce the solar wind.
So if life does exist on Earth-like planets around white dwarfs, then life must have evolved after the star's 'red giant spherical phase' ended.
In other words, it is highly unlikely that life on any planet can survive the death of its Sun. However, it is possible that new life can emerge from the old dust once the Sun shrinks and stops releasing strong winds. Possibly, for some of the planets out there in the universe, that means a new life is formed like on Earth.
