Solar System's End May Come Faster Than Expected

A new study suggests the solar system's end may be faster and more chaotic than previously thought, potentially shortening the survival of its outer planets from 100 billion years to just 1 billion years. The research was led by the California Institute of Technology and published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The Sun is expected to die in about five billion years after exhausting its core hydrogen, first expanding to engulf Mercury and Venus. While Earth might be spared, it would become a scorching, lifeless world, with the Sun's core eventually compressing into a slowly cooling white dwarf. Researchers led by Konstantin Batygin tested 672 scenarios combining solar evolution models with orbital tracking for Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. If the Sun expels its outer layers violently, 96% of scenarios show fatal instability within three billion years, including planetary ejections and orbital swaps between Uranus and Neptune.