The bad news is that in a little under 8 billion years the sun will destroy the Earth.
You can imagine that things get worse there. The process of the Sun starting to die and grow huge was not good to begin with. As hydrogen fuel runs out in the Sun's core, it will start to expand and become a subgiant, which will cause the Earth to cook. In about a billion years from now, the Sun will be so hot that the Earth will lose all it has.
The warming Sun will cause a runaway greenhouse effect on Earth that will kill it. That's right, yes.
The Earth is not as bad as the Sun is when our star expands into a red giant. The Earth will spiral down towards the Sun's core over the course of hundreds of millions of years as the Sun stays that way.
The Sun will be affected by the Earth. The earth is small. We know that some stars have giant planets that are very close in size to each other, and they will be engulfed early on in the red giant process. Studies show they can affect the star. They experience a lot of drag, plowing through the star's gas, and that can spin up the star, making it rotation faster. It's possible that this is the reason so many planetary nebulae have great shapes.
A new study uses the physics of a planet inside a Sun-like star as it dies to see what effects it has on other planets.
Three-dimensional models of how gases flow are used to look at the interaction of a planet inside a star. The ram pressure is measured as the planet plows through the star's gas and drags on it that will cause it to shrink and expand.
If the planet is large, it will affect the star's brightness. The idea that energy can't be destroyed is what this has to do with. There is a lot of energy in the motion of a planet. It only takes a small amount of fuel to accelerate a car to highway speeds, but much more for a semi. Imagine how much energy a planet has, given that it may be traveling at hundreds of thousands of kilometers per hour.
As the planet rams through the star's outer layers the energy is transferred to that gas. The star gets brighter by spinning faster. As a planet like Jupiter spirals in, it can increase the star's luminosity by a factor of hundreds of times. A brown dwarf with 80 or so times Jupiter's mass can make a star tens of thousands of times brighter in a matter of minutes. The peak of this effect lasts for a year or so, which is very short on a scale, but lower levels can last for hundreds of years.
When a star has so much energy deposited in its outer layer that it will blow away, they will fly off into space When the star is less than the Sun's diameter, its surface gravity is strong enough to hold onto the gas. The material is allowed to be ejected as the gravity weakens. The star can be ejected by a planet with ten times Jupiter's mass.
The calculations show that what happens to a star depends on its mass, how large it is, and how massive it is. Astronomers could use these calculations to look for these events in the universe. It is possible that it could be caught in the act since the space-based Gaia observatory monitors billions of stars. It would be incredible.
There's some good news if all that is bad.
The process is starting to be understood. Science is all about understanding things, even if they are not good or bad. Understanding a problem is the first step to finding a solution. If we can find a planet around a younger star in the future, then we can move onward into the universe. Earth can be moved away from the Sun to counteract its effects.
Our distant descendants will be left to worry over that. We have a long time to work out the details.
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