Monday, June 16, 2008
New Planets Everywhere
We eventually need to escape the Earth to avoid the inevitable self destruction of our Sun. We are the only species in the history of the Earth and life (as far as we know) to have the ability to escape our own destruction, and I believe we are exactly what life knew that it needed. I will always support government spending on NASA. More and more planets are being found with advances in telescopic technology. Check out this cool Article.
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2 comments:
Cool article. We do have about 1/2 a billion years or so before I need to worry, right?
Wikipedia says we have about 1 billion years before the oceans boil.
The Sun is expected to become a red giant about 7.5 billion years from now.[10] It is calculated that the Sun will become sufficiently large to engulf the current orbits of some of the solar system's inner planets, including Earth.[11][12][13] However, the Sun will lose a significant fraction of its mass in the process of becoming a red giant, and all planets but Mercury and Venus are likely to escape as their resulting orbits will widen. [14] Earth's fate is less clear. Earth could technically achieve a widening of its orbit and could potentially maintain a sufficiently high angular velocity to keep it from becoming engulfed. In order to do so, its orbit would increase to 1.7 AU (250,000,000 km). However the results of studies announced in 2008 show that due to tidal interaction between sun and Earth, Earth would actually fall back into a lower orbit, and get engulfed and incorporated inside the sun before sun reaches its largest size, despite the sun losing about 38% of its mass. [15] Before this happens; Earth's biosphere will have long been destroyed by the Sun's steady increase in brightness as its hydrogen supply dwindles and its core contracts, even before the transition to a Red Giant. After just over 1 billion years, the extra solar energy input will cause Earth's oceans to start evaporating and the hydrogen from the water to be lost permanently to space, with total loss of water by 3.5 billion years.[16] Earth's atmosphere and lithosphere will become like that of Venus. Over another billion years, most of the atmosphere will get lost in space as well;[17], ultimately leaving Earth as a dessicated, dead planet with a surface of molten rock.[18]
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