The Earth will eventually devoured by the Sun five billion years. Scientists find conclusive evidence

 

The fate of the planet Earth? It is already written: finish devoured, but rather incorporated, our parent star, the Sun latter fact to meet internal energy to the motor that operates the nuclear fusion will expand, becoming a small star quiet as it is now a so-called giant red cooler, but still about 4 thousand degrees, and huge. In short, the Sun will expand and "eat" Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars that will eventually also probably completely vaporized.

Do not panic, if all goes as it should have at least another 5 billion years available. Astrophysicists have long known him, or rather the theory him he said, but now, thanks to a team of American scientists, Polish and Spanish, think they have the ultimate test.

Using it one of the most powerful telescopes existing observatory Mac Donald in Texas, they found the light coming from the star BD +48740 traces of a rare and important as well for us, lithium. The strange thing is that the battery lives, so to speak, very little in the interior of stars, turns immediately into other elements.

A red giant, like the one observed, is by definition a star very old, about 9 billion years, so the only explanation is that lithium come from a planet, solid, which was vaporized from the star itself. A little 'as a lady who put a nice smell, not his, that we feel passing by. A lot of luck for the team since the observed process is obviously shorter than the billions of years we are talking about the existence and evolution of a star.




In order to become fully aware of the phenomenon we put some numbers: the Sun is a sphere of 1.5 million kilometers in diameter, our Earth is much, much smaller, about 13 thousand km, 100 times less, to understand how the sun expands we think that the distance from the Earth to the Sun is 150 million kilometers. Then the Sun will expand hundreds of times getting colder and subtle but huge.

Other tests, more sophisticated and complex, are treated in the work that astrophysicists have published in one of the largest and most quoted journals. This result therefore very specific, certainly important, it would not, however, received the notoriety that at this time, is going around the world in the media, if it were not that well represents our end. But still, again, missing several billion years, if the calculations of astrophysicists are not wrong.