Is THIS how the world will end? Scientists warn our solar system could be pulled by a white dwarf star’s gravity before it is ‘crushed and ground into dust’

We all know that the end of the world will eventually come, but what exactly will it look like?

In a new study, scientists have warned that Earth’s demise could be even more violent and chaotic than we thought.

According to researchers from the University of Warwick, our planet will be swallowed by our expanding sun.

Meanwhile, other planets in the solar system will be “crushed and ground to dust.”

Fortunately, there’s no need to panic yet, as scientists say this will likely happen in about six billion years.

Stars like our Sun generate light and heat by crushing hydrogen atoms into helium under the enormous force of gravity.

However, all stars only have a limited amount of hydrogen, and when it runs out, the forces that keep the star stable become unbalanced.

From about five billion years on, our Sun will burn through the hydrogen in its core, before ballooning outward to more than 200 times its original size as it begins to burn helium in its outer layers.

While some massive stars explode into supernovae during their collapse, our star is small enough to simply die out as it consumes the last of its nuclear fuel.

When this happens in about six billion years, it will leave behind a white dwarf: an ultra-dense remnant of the Sun’s core, glowing with residual heat as it slowly cools.

These stellar cores can have as much mass as the Sun, but are no larger than Earth, giving them an extremely powerful gravitational field.

Professor Boris Gaensicke from the University of Warwick said: ‘The sad news is that the Earth will probably just be swallowed up by an expanding sun before it becomes a white dwarf.’

However, less is known about what will happen to the rest of the solar system once the Sun has shrunk back into a white dwarf.

In their new study, the researchers examined the brightness of three different white dwarf stars over seventeen years.

By watching the brightness rise and fall, the scientists were able to determine when objects passed in front of the Sun and what types of objects they were.

For most stars, the changes in brightness, or transits, are very predictable, as the planets rotate in their regular pattern.

But around white dwarf stars, the researchers found that the transits were very chaotic and irregular.

This suggests that the fate of bodies surrounding white dwarf stars is likely to be catastrophic and violent.

Planets, asteroids and moons that come close to a white dwarf’s dense core are fragmented as gravity pulls them into smaller pieces.

Ultimately, these pieces are ground into dust when they collide with each other.

This dust continues to orbit the dead star until it eventually spreads out into space.

In our own solar system, this will be the fate of many of the remaining bodies that are not swallowed up or destroyed by the sun’s expansion.

Professor Gaensicke said: ‘For the rest of the solar system, some asteroids between Mars and Jupiter, and perhaps some of Jupiter’s moons, could break away and get close enough to the eventual white dwarf to undergo the fragmentation process that we have undergone. investigated.’

The researchers found similarly destructive moments in the histories of the stars they studied, with one star experiencing a “major catastrophic event” in 2010.

However, the unpredictable nature of white dwarf systems makes them difficult to study.

“The simple fact that we can detect the debris of asteroids, perhaps moons or even planets zooming around a white dwarf every few hours is quite astonishing, but our research shows that the behavior of these systems can evolve rapidly,” says Professor Gaensicke.

‘The unpredictable nature of these transits can drive astronomers crazy: one minute they’re there, the next minute they’re gone. And this points to the chaotic environment they find themselves in.”