Although the ground beneath our feet feels solid and reassuring (most of the time), nothing in this Universe lasts forever.
One day, our Sun will die, ejecting a large proportion of its mass before its core shrinks down into a white dwarf , gradually leaking heat until it's nothing more than a cold, dark, dead lump of rock, a thousand trillion years later .
Astronomers and physicists have been trying to puzzle out the ultimate fate of the Solar System for at least hundreds of years.
In case you are keeping track:
Arches of chaos in the solar system, luxury watch has bits of Stephen Hawking's desk –
If we had a "Physics paper title of the year award", the 2020 winner would surely have to be " The arches of chaos in the solar system ", which was published this week in Science Advances by Nataša Todorović, Di Wu and Aaron Rosengren. In their paper, the trio "reveal a notable and hitherto undetected ornamental structure of manifolds, connected in a series of arches that spread from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond".
The paper is beautifully written, describing the manifolds as "a true celestial autobahn," and going on to say that they "enable 'Le Petit Prince' grand tour of the solar system". And if that has not piqued your curiosity, the figures are wonderful as well – with the above image being "Jovian-minimum-distance maps for the Greek and Trojan orbital configurations".
Our solar system's gas giants are about to do something that hasn't been seen for 800 years -
An extremely rare chance to see a stunning planetary alignment will present itself to stargazers this Christmas.
The two gas giants of Jupiter and Saturn - the largest two planets in our solar system - will appear closer together in the night sky than they have in almost 800 years.
Patrick Hartigan, an astronomer at Rice University, said: "Alignments between these two planets are rather rare, occurring once every 20 years or so, but this conjunction is exceptionally rare because of how close the planets will appear to one another.
Bad Astronomy | Simulations of the solar system's future show how the planets get ejected by
Mind you, this is all true, but that's not really what happens to the solar system , just the Sun and first three planets (one of which we have a vested interest in). But there's other stuff out there too, including Mars and four giant planets. They count too. Heck, Jupiter by itself has more mass than everything else in the solar system (except the Sun, duh) combined, so its fate is very important.
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The solar system, with object sizes to scale, but not the distances. Credit: Wikipedia / WP / PlanetUser
Quite a lot has been going on:
Japan spacecraft carrying asteroid soil samples nears home
TOKYO (AP) — A Japanese spacecraft is nearing Earth after a yearlong journey home from a distant asteroid with soil samples and data that could provide clues to the origins of the solar system, a space agency official said Friday.
The Hayabusa2 spacecraft left the asteroid Ryugu, about 300 million kilometers (180 million miles) from Earth, a year ago and is expected to reach Earth and drop a capsule containing the precious samples in southern Australia on Dec. 6.
Earth is closer to supermassive black hole at center of our galaxy than we thought - CNN
(CNN) A new map of the Milky Way by Japanese space experts has put Earth 2,000 light years closer to the supermassive black hole at the center of our galaxy.
New Evidence: There Was Another Planet in the Solar System That Escaped
According to team of scientists at the Carnegie Institution for Science, an additional planet located between Saturn and Uranus got flung out of the solar system while it was still in its infancy.
The theory goes that the Sun was once surrounded by a disk of gas and dust. Through countless collisions, planets started to form, orbiting our star at a relatively short distance.
The more massive planets then kicked off a series of gravitational interactions, causing the planets to reshuffle into their current arrangement.
New Space Race Shoots for Moon and Mars on a Budget - The Washington Post
The first space race was a competition between the U.S. and the Soviet Union for national pride and military advantage. Now NASA is farming out missions to private companies, and other countries have joined the race — notably China and India. The moon and Mars remain tantalizing goals for many nations, as are the technological advances that space exploration can drive.
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Since the space shuttle program ended in 2011, NASA, as the U.S. National Aeronautics and Space Administration is better known, had relied on Russia to ferry U.S. astronauts to the International Space Station, which has orbited Earth for two decades. That changed in 2020 when billionaire Elon Musk's company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, flew its first crewed missions, powered by reusable boosters that dramatically cut launch costs. Boeing Co.
Happening on Twitter
The nitrogen in your DNA was once inside a small star. 🧬 That star shed its outer layers at the end of its life, fo… https://t.co/v45zLw1lRb NASAUniverse (from Greenbelt, MD) Mon Nov 23 15:30:01 +0000 2020
Oh my gosh! My author copies of FLASH FACTS came today! I have a Supergirl / Our Solar System story here w/… https://t.co/FBNfKVVVnT misscecil (from your heart and mine) Sun Nov 29 01:18:32 +0000 2020
Most of these interstellar spacecraft carry messages intended to introduce ourselves to any aliens that find them a… https://t.co/KH1Y0ChUbO DiscoverMag (from Between gluons and galaxies) Sun Nov 29 02:30:05 +0000 2020
If you're worried what will happen after the Sun turns into a red giant and cooks all the planets to a crisp don't… https://t.co/3JjEjgZYcv BadAstronomer (from Boulder) Tue Nov 24 16:20:40 +0000 2020
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