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Now we know how old the Sun is and when it will "die"

2022-08-28 19:39:35Fokus SHKRUAR NGA REDAKSIA VOX
Now we know how old the Sun is and when it will "die"
sun

How will the Sun evolve in the future? What will be the date of his "death"? Now astronomers have new data available to answer these questions, thanks to the European Space Agency's Gaia mission and the new information collected, which was released last June 13.

Gaia is a spacecraft launched by ESA in 2013 for a mission that should continue until 2025. Its main objective is to collect data about the stars of our galaxy: from measuring their position, distance to their movement. By comparing and studying these data - especially those related to June 13 - it was possible to discover something more about the star around which the Earth revolves, the Sun.

While the mass of stars varies relatively little, their temperature and size vary greatly over the years. These changes are determined by the type of nuclear fusion reactions taking place inside the star. To relate the properties of the hundreds of stars that we are able to observe, there is a diagram - known as the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram - created at the beginning of the twentieth century by the two astronomers Ejnar Hertzsprung and Henry Norris Russell.

This model relates a star's intrinsic luminosity to its surface temperature, and is therefore able to reveal how stars evolve over their long life cycles.

The Sun today is 4.57 billion years old. It is at a "comfortable middle age, fusing hydrogen into helium and is generally in a fairly stable, even stationary situation," ESA explains. When the hydrogen runs out in the core, changes in fusion processes will begin and the star will turn into a red giant, heading towards its "death".

To understand when this will happen, you need to have information on its mass and chemical composition. This is where the Gaia data and the HR diagram come into play, allowing us to relate the history of other stars to that of the Sun.

The analysis was done by Orlagh Creevey, a researcher at the Observatoire de la Côte d'Azur, and collaborators from Gaia's Coordination Unit 8. They mainly used data about stars with surface temperatures between 3,000 and 10,000 Kelvin (the Sun today has a surface temperature of about 6,000 Kelvin): they are the longest-lived and therefore can reveal more information about the history of The Milky Way.

They then focused on celestial bodies with the same mass and chemical composition as the Sun - the criteria included a sample of 5,863 stars - and managed to draw a line on the HR diagram representing its evolution from the past to the future.

The Sun will reach its maximum temperature when it is about 8 billion years old (so after about 3.5 billion years). Then it will cool and become a red giant star: this will happen around its 10-11 billion years (so after about 5.5 or 6.5 billion years). Eventually it will "die", turning into a white "creature".

"If we can't understand our Sun - and there's a lot we don't know about it - how can we think we understand all the other stars that make up our wonderful galaxy?" Creevey explained.

Corriere/ Vox News


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