29-05-2025
Is THIS how the world will end? Scientists warn Earth could be flung out of orbit by a passing star - leaving humans to freeze to death
From Armageddon to the Day After Tomorrow, there have been plenty of Hollywood movies about how our world might end.
But if there is to be a global apocalypse, what might be to blame for wiping out all life on Earth?
Scientists believe they may finally have the answer - and it suggests we could face a grisly demise.
In a new study, researchers from the Planetary Science Institute and the University of Bordeaux predict that Earth could be flung out of orbit by a passing star.
And without our Sun there to keep us warm, this would leave any inhabitants - including humans - to freeze to death.
Thankfully, the chances of this happening are very low.
Over the next five billion years, the chance of Earth being flung out of orbit by a passing star is around one in 500, according to the team.
'We find a 0.3% chance that Mars will be lost through collision or ejection and a 0.2% probability that Earth will be involved in a planetary collision or ejected,' the team wrote in their study.
For decades, scientists have pondered how the Earth could end.
A wandering black hole, giant asteroid impact and nuclear war could all trigger catastrophic disasters, as could the rise of killer robots or the reversal of our planet's magnetic field.
In their new study, published in arXiv, Nathan Kaib and Sean Reynold set out to understand whether passing stars could be to blame.
'The long-term dynamical future of the Sun's planets has been simulated and statistically analyzed in great detail,' the pair explained.
'But most prior work considers the solar system as completely isolated, neglecting the potential influence of field star passages.'
To answer this question, the pair ran thousands of simuations of our solar system in the presence of passing stars over the next five billion years.
Worryingly, their simulations revealed that our solar system's eight planets - as well as dwarf planet, Pluto - are 'significantly less stable than previouly thought'.
Pluto faces the greatest risk of being lost through a collision or ejection, with the simulations revealing a five per cent chance.
Mars fares slightly better with a 0.3 per cent chance, while Earth has a 0.2 per cent chance of being flung out of the solar system.
As for the passing stars to be on the lookout for, the researchers predict that the most dangerous ones are those that come within 100 times as far from the sun as Earth is.
According to the simulations, there's about a five per cent chance of such a close encounter over the next five billion years.
'In summary, passing stars can alter the stability of the planets and Pluto as well as the secular architecture of the giant planets over the next 5 Gyrs [5 billion years,' the authors concluded.
'Their significance on the solar system's dynamical future largely depends on the strength of the most powerful stellar passage over this time span, which is uncertain by orders of magnitude.
'This uncertainty in the Sun's future powerful stellar encounters means that the spectrum of future secular evolution and planetary instabilities is broader than that implied by isolated models of solar system evolution.'
