The Earth and other planets of the solar system will literally be "covered" with huge piles of sand, nano-diamonds and corundum, which the star will generate in the last moments of its life, astronomers say in an article published in the journal MNRAS.
“We have shown that supernova explosions were one of the main sources of dust and other solid matter in the early universe. It turned out that not all of its particles are destroyed by the shock wave after the death of the star, about 20% of them survive. This noticeably changes the picture of the evolution of the universe,”the scientists write.
Life factory
In about 4.5-5 billion years, our Sun will exhaust its reserves of hydrogen, "nuclear fuel", and begin to burn helium, as a result of which its bowels will heat up to ultra-high temperatures, and the outer shells of the sun will swell, engulfing Venus and Mercury and turning the Earth into lifeless hot ball.
Ultimately, the Sun will get rid of all the outer layers of gas, survive a series of powerful flares and turn into a white dwarf - a small but very hot star that continues to glow due to the remnants of heat retained in the former core. Its light will heat up and illuminate the surrounding clouds of gas, turning them into a bright spot in the night sky of other worlds, the so-called planetary nebula.
In such a fate of the sun, as noted by Jeonghee Rho from the SETI Institute for the Search for Extraterrestrial Civilizations in Mountain View (USA), today no one doubts - just over the past few years, astronomers have found hundreds of gas and dust nebulae and thousands of supernova explosions.
On the other hand, scientists have been arguing for almost three decades about how the planetary nebula generated by it will look like, whether it will exist at all and what will happen to the Earth and other "surviving" planets. The answers to these questions are extremely important in assessing how many planetary "building materials" are giving rise to dying stars.
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For example, scientists believe that almost all cosmic dust arises in the last stages of the life of relatively small stars, whose mass is not enough for a "direct" transformation into a supernova in the last stages of their life. Supernovae themselves, on the contrary, do not produce, but destroy its seeds.
Calculations show that the shock wave that arose after the explosion of the star should grind up virtually all the dust ejected by the aged star shortly before its death. Recently, this idea, as the astrophysicist explains, began to be strongly criticized, as it turned out that in the early Universe, where almost all the stars turned into supernovae, there was an inexplicable amount of dust.
In the world of deserts
Ro and her colleagues found an explanation for this oddity by observing the remains of two relatively recent supernovae - Cas A, which exploded in the night sky in 1667, and its "older sister," G54.1 + 0.3, discovered in 1985, but exploded about three centuries ago. In the past, scientists have tried to find dust deposits inside them using infrared telescopes, and its mass turned out to be even lower than theory predicted.
Studying these data and images, astronomers noticed one unusual thing. The thermal radiation from the remains of stars was highly polarized, which usually happens if it "collides" not with round dust particles, but with grains of matter of an oblong or irregular shape.
Guided by this thought, astronomers figured out how interactions with such dust grains should change the radiation of neutron stars in the centers Cas A and G54.1 + 0.3, and tracked them using the Spitzer and Herschel telescopes and a number of ground-based observatories.
By combining all their images at different wavelengths, Ro and her colleagues found that past observations greatly underestimated the mass of dust in the gas cocoons of these supernovae. According to their current estimates, all dust grains weighed about the same as a quarter of the Sun, which is several orders of magnitude higher than past predictions.
The progenitor stars Cas A and G54.1 + 0.3, as noted by scientists, were similar in size and properties to the Sun. Accordingly, it can be expected that after the death of the star, the Earth, Mars and the more distant planets of the solar system will turn into desert worlds dotted with microdiamonds and corundums.
This event, however, will not greatly change their habitability. The expansion of the shells of the Sun and an increase in its brightness will lead to the fact that life will disappear from the surface of our planet long before that, as all its reserves of water and air will evaporate or "escape" into space.
