Don’t get too upset, though, because it’s obviously a long way from now. At present, our sun is considered to be in the prime of its life. It is at its comfortable average age of 4.57 billion years, productively fusing hydrogen into helium and shining like a glorious paper lantern. But scientists are still interested in understanding the sun’s future orbit. Although we might expect our host star to be the easiest of its kind to study, it is actually much more difficult to analyze than more distant stars because it is so bright due to its proximity. We need special telescopes and instruments adapted to solar observations. However, “If we don’t understand our own sun — and there’s a lot we don’t know about it — how can we expect to understand all the other stars that make up our wonderful galaxy,” Orlagh Creevey, an astronomer from the Observatory of Cote d’Azur in France, he said in a press release. Creevey is also part of the European Space Agency’s massive effort to map the entire Milky Way galaxy in unprecedented detail. It’s called Gaia — and sure enough, while constructing an ultimate diagram of our cosmic neighborhood, Gaia’s collaborators figured out what will happen to the sun billions of years from now. In short, the team found that the sun will reach its maximum temperature at about 8 billion years of age, after which it will cool but continue to increase in size. At about 10 billion to 11 billion years old, the Gaia data revealed, the sun will become a spectacular red giant (like the 10th brightest star in the night sky, called Betelgeuse) before beginning its final end-of-life sequence. A visual representation of the sun’s lifetime can be seen below. Here’s a line found on the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram, which plots a star’s intrinsic luminosity versus its actual surface temperature. Note how, as the video progresses, the sun’s path begins to scale. Exponentially. The evolution of a sun-like star as derived from ESA’s Gaia mission data release 3, through the Hertzsprung-Russell diagram. ESA/Gaia/DPAC This version of a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram was obtained with a selection of stars from the second Gaia circulation catalog. It is the most detailed mapping of stars in the entire sky to date, according to ESA. ESA/Gaia/DPAC The way the team derived this information was by somehow casting an extremely wide net across all the Gaia data retrieved so far from our Galaxy, then identifying stars with temperatures, surface gravities, chemical compositions, masses and rays that are similar to them. of the sun. For example, the search focused on surface temperatures between 3,000 and 10,000 kelvins, because the sun has a current surface temperature of 6,000 Kelvin. But while searching for these candidates, the team took care to pick out stars similar to our sun but different in age so that a detailed timeline could be constructed. “We wanted to have a really clean sample of stars with high-precision measurements,” Creevey said. In total, they found 5,863 ideal solar vessels, according to ESA. In the future, according to the Gaia collaboration, it will not only be useful for developing a clear orbit of the sun, but it will also be useful for scientists who have other solar questions, such as “do all solar analog planetary systems similar to ours do all solar analogs rotate at a similar rate to our sun?”
