No life will survive the death of the sun — but new life could be born after, new research suggests

[Admin]

When Earth's sun grows into a red giant 5 billion years from now, solar wind will shred our planet's magnetic field to bits.

No life will survive the death of the sun — but new life could be born after, new research suggests : Read more

 

[Catastrophe]

I once got it wrong about the effect of the Sun's expansion in about 5 billion years time. I did not allow for the obvious fact that Jupiter and Saturn were mostly H and He, so what would be left when the Sun reached Venus?
Will our favoured distant moons of liquid water oceans become cast off by the meagre remnants of the once gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn not much larger than Ganymede or Titan today?

Cat

 

[rod]

The article at the end, "In other words, it's extremely unlikely that life on any planet can survive the death of its sun — but new life could spring from the ashes of the old once that sun shrivels up and turns off its violent winds. So, the wind may be against us now, but one day it will be gone. Hopefully, for some worlds out there in the universe, that means new life and smooth sailing."

Okay, stellar evolution takes a main sequence star like our Sun and turns it into a white dwarf (WD). Then apparently debris left behind from any previous planets, abiogenesis could create new life there again. Other reports on WD with debris disk are very interesting, especially in view of this article suggesting abiogenesis will create *new life* on another planet that evolves around the WD star.

Planetary remnants around white dwarf stars, https://phys.org/news/2021-07-planetary-remnants-white-dwarf-stars.html, "...Astronomers have established that planets orbiting stars can usually survive the late stages of their host's evolution. The rocky planets are broken apart and disbursed into dusty debris disks, and so white dwarf stars should retain remnant evidence of their planetary companions."

My observation. The NASA ADS Abstract is, White dwarfs with planetary remnants in the era of Gaia - I. Six emission line systems, https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2021MNRAS.504.2707G/abstract, June 2021. The arXiv paper link is, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2010.13807.pdf, 23 pages long and dated 19-May-2021. Table 2 shows WD properties. Masses range from 0.55 Msun to 0.64 Msun. Table 3 shows a list of known WD with disks and properties. Masses range 0.49 Msun to 0.841 Msun. WD cooling ages is provided for the WDs reviewed in this study. On page 14, cooling ages range 21 to 281 million years old. The paper reports Gaia parallaxes were used to determine distances to the WDs in the study.

Two things must happen here based upon this article at space.com. 1. the debris disk must evolve into new planets around the white dwarfs, and 2. abiogenesis must create new life there too. It should be interesting to observe this take place in nature.

 

[rod]

White dwarfs reporting exoplanets confirmed today, most indicate large masses in very short orbital periods. Example, SMSS J1606-1000 b, http://exoplanet.eu/catalog/smss_j1606-1000_b/

This is something else to consider when thinking about new planets and new life evolving around white dwarfs after old planets and old life was destroyed during the stellar evolution changes.