• Question: if the sun becomes a white dwarf what happens next exluding all the planets get eaten?

    Asked by domino90 to Omur, Maddison, Jimi, Hayley, Chris on 11 Mar 2016.
    • Photo: Chris Conselice

      Chris Conselice answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      Not all the planets will be ‘eaten’ but before the Sun becomes a white dwarf it will be a red giant and it will expand well past the orbit of the Earth — so our planet will be destroyed by this.

      however, the outer planets like uranus and neptune will get warmer but will not otherwise be affected and we should have those planets still orbiting the white dwarf. However, the white dwarf will have lower mass than the Sun does today, so the gravity will not be as strong and the planets will likely orbit further away and at a slower speed.

      good question

    • Photo: Jimi Wills

      Jimi Wills answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      our sun is a yellow dwarf, and burns over a half a trillion tonnes of hydrogen per second. It can keep going for 10 billion years before it becomes a red giant, 200 times its current size.

      It will definitely swallow Mercury, Venus and Earth, and probably Mars too.

      Then it will shed it’s outer layers and become a white dwarf, about half the mass it is now, and it will be about the size of the Earth.

      The other planets won’t change much, but will start to drift away slowly. They will disrupt the asterioid belts, which will then get shredded to dust.

      All this has been modelled by NASA using special computer software that they wrote.

    • Photo: Omur Tastan

      Omur Tastan answered on 11 Mar 2016:

      Chris and Jimi explained the process quite well.

      One thing to add is that, after becoming the white dwarf, the Sun would stay that way for a long time until it becomes a black dwarf and up until now there is no black dwarf.

      Home message is that we would all be gone 😉 to see what’s next :))

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