The distance between the Earth and the Sun is unstable due to its elliptical orbit, but over the years scientists have calculated the average distance to be 150 million kilometers, according to NASA. However, this number is changing, increasing over time.
Live Science reports that the top two reasons scientists have come up with are the loss of mass in the Sun, or a similar force related to Earth’s tides.
The Earth is gradually “drifting” out of the arms of the mother star? – Illustration from iStock
According to NASA, the lifespan of our parent star is only about 5 billion years. During the rest of the time, modeling of how the star grows suggests it will lose about 0.1% of its mass before it dies.
Astronomer Brian DiGiorgio from the University of California at Santa Cruz – USA explains that the figure of 0.1% is actually very large for the mass of the Sun. This 0.1% is equivalent to the mass of Jupiter, or 318 times the mass of the Earth.
The strength of an object’s gravity will be directly proportional to its mass, so it is likely that the attraction from the parent star has decreased, leading to the Earth drifting further away.
And according to associate professor of astrophysics Britt Scharringhausen from Beloit University in Wisconsin – USA, the Sun rotates on its axis about every 27 days, not a dance in harmony with the 1 365-day rotation of the Earth, which That combined with Earth’s own gravitational interaction creates a bizarre tidal bulge, which has the effect of gradually bending the planet’s orbit away from its parent star.
However, this impact is very small, only enough to make the Earth move 0.0003 cm/year, so the cause of the lighter parent star still plays a major role.
Earth’s drift away from its parent star is not thought to be enough to have a major climate effect. In the next 5 billion years, the distance will increase by 0.2%, corresponding to a decrease of 0.4% of the solar energy reaching the Earth. But this number is small compared to the seasonal variation caused by Earth’s elliptical orbit.
The real apocalypse can only happen after half a billion years, when the Sun enters its dying phase – a red giant that gets bigger and bigger before collapsing. At that time, the heat hitting the Earth will increase rapidly, causing the oceans to boil, life in danger of extinction
