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Yahoo
3 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
When will the solar system die out?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. Our solar system has been around for 4.6 billion years. While that sounds like a long time, it's just a blip in the 13.8 billion-year story of the universe. And one day, the solar system will cease to exist. But when will the solar system end? And how will it die out? The answers to those questions depend on how we define the death of the solar system. The solar system consists of eight planets, several dwarf planets, hundreds of moons, and billions of asteroids, comets and meteoroids. The exact boundaries of the solar system are subject to debate, but there are three main candidates: the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy objects beyond Neptune; the heliopause, where the sun's magnetic field ends; and the Oort cloud, a theoretical icy cloud lying beyond both the Kuiper Belt and the heliosphere. And, of course, at the center of it all, the sun is keeping it all together with its immense gravity. Like all stars, the sun will eventually die. Right now, it creates heat and light by transforming hydrogen into helium in its core through a process called nuclear fusion. The sun will continue to burn hydrogen for approximately another 5 billion years, said Fred Adams, a theoretical astrophysicist at the University of Michigan. But once that hydrogen fuel runs out, the sun will become more and more unstable. Its core will collapse, its surface will expand, and it will transform into a cool, bloated red giant that will engulf Mercury and then Venus. Sign up for our newsletter Sign up for our weekly Life's Little Mysteries newsletter to get the latest mysteries before they appear online. While our planet might be at the border of the red giant's surface, Adams said, chances are, it will get sucked into the red giant, too. By this point, though, humans will have been long gone. Mars will likely survive the red giant, and the outer planets are all safely outside of the red giant's reach. The Oort cloud will also be destabilized, Stern said, and the heliosphere will shrink down. Related: When will the universe die? About a billion years later, the sun will shrink to the size of Earth and transform into a white dwarf — a dim, extremely dense core of its former self. The solar system will become a freezing, desolate place. "From a habitability standpoint, that's kind of the end of the solar system," Alan Stern, a planetary scientist and principal investigator of NASA's New Horizons mission, told Live Science. Although the sun's death marks the end of the solar system as we know it, it doesn't necessarily mean its total demise. "A strict, nerdy answer is that the solar system will never end due to the sun's evolution" or the death of the sun, Stern said. Even when the sun is a burnt out cinder, he said, many objects — including giant planets like Jupiter — will continue to orbit it. Even further into the future, Adams said, the likelihood of rare events increases. Without the sun's gravitational force, the solar system will become increasingly chaotic as the gravitational balance of the solar system shifts. The risk of collisions, passing stars or supernovas coming too close to the solar system and then tearing apart its celestial bodies and space rocks will also be magnified. RELATED MYSTERIES —Did light exist at the beginning of the universe? —Could a black hole devour the universe? —How long can an asteroid 'survive'? "We're not just waiting until the universe is twice as old. We're waiting till it's a billion times older, a trillion times older, and a quadrillion times older," he explained. "If you wait, those enormous time scales and rare events start to add up. It's like, it's rare for you to win the lottery, but if you play a billion times, your chances will go up." Even if the solar system is spared a catastrophic collision, it won't last forever. Some scientists also think the protons that make up our universe will decay. The phenomenon has never been observed, but theoretical experiments have placed the proton's lifetime past 1034 years, and that number might be pushed back even further as experiments into their longevity keep running. Solar system quiz: How well do you know our cosmic neighborhood? Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
6 days ago
- Science
- Yahoo
New tiny world beyond Neptune discovered, giving boost to ‘Planet Nine' theory
Astronomers used a telescope in Hawaii to find a new object on the outer edges of our solar system, helping to fuel evidence of a long-standing theory about Planet Nine, or Planet X. For years, scientists have theorized about a ninth planet beyond Neptune because of the orbital patterns of smaller objects in the Kuiper Belt, a region of icy objects beyond Neptune. Pluto is considered a Kuiper Belt Object, or KBO. The theoretical planet would be the ninth planet because in 2016 Pluto was downgraded to a dwarf planet after the object Eris was discovered. On 95Th Anniversary Of Pluto Discovery, Its Home Observatory Celebrates Solar System's Underdog On Tuesday, scientists with the Subaru Telescope operated by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan revealed a fourth member of the sednoids, a group of small bodies with "peculiar orbits." The findings were published this week in Nature Astronomy. Nicknamed "Ammonite," researchers say it could provide more evidence for the hypothetical "Planet Nine" beyond Neptune. Ammonite has likely been around since the solar system's infancy and has maintained a stable orbit for about 4.5 billion years, according to the research group. This newly discovered object follows a different orbit than the other sednoids. Telescope Captures Sight Of Bright Auroras, But These Aren't On Earth "The numerical simulations conducted in this study suggest that if Planet Nine exists, its orbit should lie even farther out than previously predicted," according to a news release from the observatory. "Furthermore, the existence of Planet Nine would also need to explain why Ammonite's orbit does not cluster with those of the other sednoids." According to Dr. Fumi Yoshida, of the University of Occupational and Environmental Health and the Chiba Institute of Technology, who led the survey project, Ammonite is too far away from Neptune for major gravitational influence. "The presence of objects with elongated orbits and large perihelion distances in this area implies that something extraordinary occurred during the ancient era when Ammonite formed," Yoshida said. "Understanding the orbital evolution and physical properties of these unique, distant objects is crucial for comprehending the full history of the Solar System." According to NASA, "Planet X (Planet Nine) has not yet been discovered, and there is debate in the scientific community about whether it exists."Original article source: New tiny world beyond Neptune discovered, giving boost to 'Planet Nine' theory Solve the daily Crossword
Yahoo
05-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
What are dwarf planets — and how many are there?
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. In 2006, Pluto was famously demoted from a planet to a dwarf planet. It remains the most famous dwarf planet today, but there are others in our solar system, including potentially hundreds that haven't been discovered yet. But what, exactly, is a dwarf planet? And how many dwarf planets are there? A dwarf planet is a celestial body that is smaller than a planet but bigger than an asteroid or other small rock in the solar system. They're not planets because they only meet two of the three criteria for something in space to be considered a true planet. A planet is defined by three qualities: It orbits the sun, it's mostly round, and it's massive enough for its gravity to have mostly kicked large objects from its orbit. Pluto and some other known dwarf planets meet the first two criteria but not the third because they orbit in the Kuiper Belt, a region beyond Neptune filled with small icy debris. When Pluto was first discovered in 1930, it (and other similar objects in the Kuiper Belt) were so far away and faint that they were really hard to spot, even with the most powerful telescopes at the time. Indeed, the very qualities that make something a dwarf planet make those objects particularly hard to detect. Related: James Webb telescope discovers 'a new kind of climate' on Pluto, unlike anything else in our solar system "There are a few things that work against us spotting them," Mathew Yu, an astronomer at UCLA, told Live Science in an email. "They are far away from the sun. The reflected light from them is faint as a result. Some have low reflectivity, making light reflecting off them fainter." Plus, "they move slowly across the sky due to their large distance from the sun," he added. "They go around the sun once every hundreds of Earth years. So their relative motions to the background stars are small. For astronomers with a limited observing time, these objects become hard to detect." Astronomers got a lot better at finding objects in the Kuiper Belt in the 1990s and 2000s as telescope technology improved. And once they could see a bit better, they noticed there were a lot more rocks out there with orbits similar to Pluto's. Between 2002 and 2005, astronomers found seven more particularly large rocks: Haumea, Makemake, Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus, Eris and Salacia. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) — the group of astronomers that decides on official names and terms for things in space — decided in 2006 that a new category was needed to describe these objects that were pretty big but not big enough to clear their orbits as a true planet does. Thus, the name "dwarf planet" was born. With eight named large rocks in the Kuiper Belt, you might think that means there are eight dwarf planets. However, not all astronomers agree on the number. "Accepted numbers range between around 10 to a few hundred in the Kuiper Belt alone," Yu said. "Some estimate that there may be up to tens of thousands of them beyond the Kuiper Belt." The IAU has officially recognized only five dwarf planets: Pluto, Haumea, Makemake and Eris in the Kuiper Belt, plus Ceres in the asteroid belt. We've sent space probes to only two of these: Pluto (visited by NASA's New Horizons) and Ceres (visited by NASA's Dawn), both of which flew by those bodies in 2015. Astronomers who observe dwarf planets, however, tend to recognize nine: the previous five, plus Quaoar, Sedna, Orcus and Gonggong. Gonggong was discovered in 2007 after the dwarf planet name change, but it wasn't confirmed until some new observations from NASA telescopes in 2016. The IAU is still considering proposals on these dwarfish bodies. RELATED STORIES —Watch newly discovered 'interstellar visitor' 3I/ATLAS shoot toward us in first livestream today (July 3) —'A completely new phenomenon': Astronomers spot a planet causing its star to constantly explode —James Webb telescope discovers tentacled 'jellyfish' galaxy swimming through deep space There are at least a handful more objects that have been proposed but need more observations to confirm their size and, therefore, dwarf planet status. And in June 2025, scientists proposed a new possible dwarf planet: 2017 OF201. Astronomers found this particularly faint object by searching through an old pile of data with new advanced algorithms. If you count all of the currently proposed dwarf planets plus the newcomer, that makes eighteen or more dwarf planets in the solar system — and that's just the ones we've seen. There are likely more out there, perhaps even hundreds or thousands, someday to be revealed as our telescopes keep getting better.
Yahoo
03-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
A Fusion Rocket Could Soon Reach a World We Haven't Seen Since the Stone Age
Here's what you'll learn when you read this story: In 2076, the dwarf planet Sedna will make its closest approach to the Sun in 11,400 years, and scientists are now figuring out the best way to visit the outer solar system visitor before its too late. Although this is its 'closest' approach, Sedna will still be more than twice the distance that Sun is from Pluto, so any mission will have a plethora of challenges, including how to get there in the first place. A new study examines the possibility of using direct fusion drives (DFD) or solar sails for such a mission, and while each have their benefits, a reliable fusion drive could deliver a 1,500 kg payload in orbit around Sedna, providing an unprecedented opportunity to learn about the furthest reaches of the Solar System. The story of the past 35 years in astronomy has been discovering just how massive our Solar System really is. In 1992, astronomers spotted the minor planet 15760 Albion, the first object ever spotted beyond Pluto and the first official member of the Kuiper Belt. Later, at the turn of the century, astronomers (especially Mike Brown at Caltech) made a string of discoveries, including Quaoar, Maki, Makemake, Eris, and Sedna. Although these discoveries in aggregate is what eventually doomed Pluto to a planetary demotion (Eris is just a sliver smaller than pluto), Sedna was particularly eye-catching. Roughly three times smaller than our Moon, Sedna has an extremely narrow and elliptical orbit, making its closest approach to the sun (perihelion) at roughly 76 AU—some 12.3 times closer than its aphelion at 937 AU. This makes Sedna a kind of planetary emissary to the far-flung Oort cloud. Oh, and astronomers discovered another interesting aspect about Sedna: Its closest approach was just one human lifetime away. Fast-forward 22 years from its initial discovery and astronomers are debating how to best study this astronomical event that hasn't occurred since humans first developed agriculture during the tail end of the Stone Age. A new study, published in the online preprint server arXiv, scientists from the U.S. and Italy analyze a hypothetical mission using two distinct approaches—solar sails and direct fusion drives (DFD). While conventional propulsion systems could require up to 30 years to perform a flyby maneuver, both solar sails and DFDs could pull off the feat in about one-third of the time. However, the outcomes of those twin missions would be vastly different because a DFD drive could actually perform an orbital insertion maneuver whereas a solar sail would be a strictly flyby mission, much like New Horizons swinging by Pluto in 2015. 'Due to the limitations of traditional methods, innovative propulsion systems are crucial to reach distant targets like Sedna,' the authors write. 'Chemical propulsion, while providing high thrust for launches, suffers from low efficiency and high fuel mass requirements for long-duration missions. Electric propulsion, including ion and Hall effect thrusters, offers much higher efficiency and finds many applications nowadays but produces insufficient thrust for rapid deep-space travel.' A DFD, like the Princeton Field-Reversed Configuration (PFRC), would by and large be the preferred method. By the study's estimates, a fusion drive would reduce the mission time compared to conventional rockets by 50 percent while also delivering a 1500 kg payload, which is 1,000 times more than the solar sail alternative. However, this is far from a fool-proof plan. For one, fusion drives have yet to prove plasma stability and reliability during deep-space missions and that's not even beginning to consider things like communication. Secondly, while Sedna is making its 'closest' approach in 2076, it's still more than double the distance from the Sun to Pluto, meaning one-way-light-time (OWLT) would be about 13 hours—not exactly an easy environment for reliable communication. Sending a spacecraft to Sedna would be one of the greatest challenges in the history of spaceflight, but a rewarding one. Due to its extremely strange orbit, Sedna could provide an unprecedented opportunity to learn about some of the farthest reaches of our own Solar System. Luckily, we still have a few more years to perfect a mission (especially if we go the DFD route), but scientists would need to get working sooner rather than later so that this once-in-140-lifetimes opportunity doesn't slip through our orbital grasp. You Might Also Like The Do's and Don'ts of Using Painter's Tape The Best Portable BBQ Grills for Cooking Anywhere Can a Smart Watch Prolong Your Life?
The Guardian
20-06-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Hey aliens, here's our new album! How do you follow up a 50-year-old record that's hurtling through space?
It's almost 50 years since one of the strangest records ever made was launched – not into the pop charts but into the farthest reaches of outer space. Known as the Golden Record, this 12-inch, gold-plated copper disc was an album compiled by astronomer Carl Sagan featuring everything from classical music and spoken-word greetings to the sounds of nature and a blast of Chuck Berry's Jonny B Goode. Humans could enjoy it, of course, but they weren't the target audience. Rather, a copy was placed on Voyager 1 and 2, the two space probes launched in 1977, in the hope that they would one day be discovered and listened to by an alien life form. The Golden Record came with various diagrammatic instructions on how to play it correctly. But as to what aliens might make of Bach's Brandenburg Concerto, the sounds of humpback whales and a greeting in the Chinese dialects Wu, we will never know. Both Voyager probes are still intact, currently hurtling through the Kuiper belt in interstellar space, but we are likely to lose contact with them in around a decade's time. This means we will miss the Golden Record's first realistic chance of being discovered – when it's expected to pass within 1.6 light years of the star Gliese 445 in 40,000 years' time. And yet the record continues to inspire. It's certainly the key influence behind Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot, the first in a series of three audio works by arts organisation Artangel that are being released on digital platforms in the run-up to the Golden Record's 50th anniversary. 'I visit artist studios and hear what they're grappling with,' says Artangel director Mariam Zulfiqar. 'They worry about what digital technology has done to human connection, this looming fear of climate, the state of geopolitics. Yet, within that fear, is also an enormous hope for what they believe humanity could be – and a desire to keep making new work that shows us a different perspective on ourselves.' Zulfiqar has been fascinated with the Golden Record ever since she was a child growing up in Pakistan. 'To send this out there without knowing what would happen is quite romantic, especially in today's outcome-driven world,' she says. So she came up with an idea: what if we made a modern version of the Golden Record that was less concerned with introducing ourselves to aliens and more about introducing humanity to itself? She got to work inviting artists from around the world to contribute. The result is a collection of poems and experimental compositions that grapple with our present moment. Sebastián Riffo Valdebenito creates a track from the sounds of rock carving at the petroglyph site of Valle del Encanto in Coquimbo, Chile, while Michel Nieva contributes The Alien Mother, a short story set in a future where humanity has colonised Mars. Elsewhere, there are poems about US turmoil, ethereal songs created using just the human voice, and what is described as a 'sonic invocation' that honours the calabash, a hard-shelled type of fruit used to make instruments. It's almost as diverse and confounding as the Golden Record itself which, along with its various audio recordings, featured 115 images encoded in analogue form (a circle, a track athlete, etc) and a condensed recording of Sagan's wife's brainwaves, captured while she thought deeply about the Earth's history and various human experiences such as falling in love (I'd like to see you work that one out, aliens!). 'What surprised me is the connections,' says Zulfiqar. 'There's a beautiful line in Nigerian poet Ofem Ubi's piece Family Tree that says, 'In my attempts at tethering, I have loved many people, countries, ghosts.' That sense of lost love is echoed in some of the other works. Similarly, Emilia Álvarez and Max Cooper both made music using sounds from the human body.' The latter's track, Rhythm of Harmony (A Representation of Music), is the contribution most likely to have worked on the original LP. Inspired by some of the more withering responses to the Golden Record by philosophers of the time, who mocked the idea that other life forms would have a clue how to read the instructions, never mind appreciate, say, the traditional Aboriginal song Devil Bird, Cooper set about making a record that would have the best chance of making sense to an alien. His piece is based on a series of rhythmic clicks that gradually speed up until they make the sound of a tone, at least to human ears. 'I've assumed the alien that discovers this is spacefaring, so they're probably more advanced than us and their transition from individual sounds to tones maybe happens at a much higher frequency than ours,' he says. 'So they won't hear these nice tones like we do – what they'll hear is the relationship in terms of the rhythms of the clicks. I wanted to break music down to the simplest source of sound that an alien might be able to understand.' Cooper has a science background – he holds a PhD in computational biology and previously worked as a geneticist – which he puts to good use when I ask questions such as: what if aliens haven't evolved hearing in the same way we have? 'There's a thing called convergent evolution,' he says. 'On Earth, the eye has evolved multiple times independently. It's the same with other senses like hearing. That gives us reason to believe that aliens would have similar senses. It's not watertight but you can definitely make that argument.' Cooper's track is embellished with huge 1980s synth chords that give it a brilliantly retro sci-fi feel, a concession to the fact that it's currently only going to be heard by humans. 'Originally, the plan was for it to be made only with sounds made by the body, but the chords that came from just the body were pretty nasty,' he says. 'I love conceptual music but I wanted to make something that was nice to listen to as well.' Trying to empathise with the sensory evolution of an alien race is an act of optimism that chimes with the original spirit of the Golden Record. But other contributions to Earth Rising strike a bleaker note: dehumanisation, fascism and grief are all picked over by the various artists. Porsha Olayiwola's scathing In Alignment With the Women Before Me documents the horrors that have taken place on American soil in recent years, namechecking Amber Thurman, the 28-year-old medical assistant who died of septic shock in Georgia after a medical abortion. It also references Aaron Bushnell, the 25-year-old serviceman who set himself alight outside the Israeli embassy in Washington DC. 'I struggle with my role as a poet/writer/artist/witness,' says Olayiwola. 'Part of me always wants to do more than write – I want to organise and protest and mobilise. I ask, 'What can I do with my pencil? What can I do with my voice?' I thought, if anything, we must begin to speak about these things. Acknowledge and witness and document these atrocities. And perhaps we will begin to intervene.' I wonder if the despair of today is a little jarring considering the hope and optimism of the original project, but Zulfiqar disagrees. 'Even when somebody is saying something quite bleak,' she says, 'it reflects that they believe things could be better.' Olayiwola agrees: 'We only leave the bleakness behind if we elect to look it directly in the eye, and shape our future accordingly. My poem serves as a reflection of the abyss. May it be as dark as the night sky in which we may see a glimmer of a star.' Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot is out now
