Newfound Planet Offers Clues to Earth's Fate 8 Billion Years From Now

KMT-2020-BLG-0414Photo byhttps://science.nasa.gov/

Astronomers and researchers have achieved a significant milestone, unveiling a projection of Earth's potential appearance 8 billion years from now. Their groundbreaking findings, based on a distant planet with conditions akin to ours, have provided a unique glimpse into the future of our planet. 

The planet, twice the size of our own, is labeled 'KMT-2020-BLG-0414' and is located 4,000 light years from our own. It is a rocky world that orbits a 'white dwarf,' a small, very dense star formed when a low-mass star has exhausted all its central nuclear fuel. Our sun is expected to transform into a 'white dwarf' in the next 5 billion years. 

Illustration of a newfound small white dwarf, the largest known, weighing 1.35 times as much as our sun.Photo byGiuseppe Parisi

The question of Earth's and humanity's survival until that time remains a topic of intense debate. The rapid acceleration of climate change, the looming threat of runaway greenhouse gas effects on our oceans, the specter of nuclear war, and the potential impact of large asteroids hitting our planet all cast a shadow of uncertainty. 

Our sun will eventually experience a 'red giant' phase caused by the depletion of its own hydrogen fuel; it will begin consuming helium, growing larger and larger in size and engulfing any nearby planets. It would consume Mercury, Venus, and possibly Mars and the Earth. However, if Earth is spared from this event, it would drift farther away from the cooling remains of the sun's heat and come to look like the recently discovered planet. 

Scientists cannot say if humans or Earth itself could survive all of these events. If we did, it is likely, given our possible technology at the time, to migrate to nearby icy moons such as Europa, which orbits Jupiter, or Enceladus, which orbits Saturn. These cold moons would actually become water worlds during the last years of the sun as we know it. While all this is highly heady and disparaging, we are talking about billions of years from now. And while we can't prevent our sun's eventual demise, we can offer future generations hope by safeguarding the Earth from the most grievous of climate change effects. It's nice to know that an Earth-like companion is floating out in the universe having survived it all.