h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

>The Earth will be consumed into the expanding Sun.

No, that's not inevitable and self-evident. It is taught and The mass of the Sun decreases, when it converts to a red giant. Only Mercury will be inevitably swallowed by the Sun. Venus and the outer planets can increase their orbiting distance from the Sun. Earth will be about at the orbit Mars is today.

I can't reference this claim right now to any Internet source, but you can read something anyway. This mass-loss was in the only real and reliable Finnish science magazine, Tiede, published by Tieteen tiedotus ry and Helsinki Media. It's can be reached from [URL removed by moderator] A NASA high energy physicist has answered a question about the mass loss: contant the server 'imagine' at subdomain 'gsfc' at NASA's domain nasa.gov, and read answer '980101a' (in hypertext markup language, with the appropriate extension) at the directory 'docs/ask_astro/answers'. The protocols is left as an exercise to the reader.

>The outer shell of the Sun will then explode and move away.

The shell has no energy source for an explosion, but it will be "blown away" like a wind.

>The core will collapse further into a super-dense cold star - a >White Dwarf.

Cold? Why would a dwarf be _white_ if it didn't have a surface temperature of 100000 C ? It will be initially hot, but veeery slooowly cool down to a brown dwarf, a dead and lonely piece of iron.

>If the mass is high enough it will become a neutron star.

The Sun is too light.

>The mass of the Sun decreases, when it converts to a red giant. Only >Mercury will be inevitably swallowed by the Sun. Venus and the outer >planets can increase their orbiting distance from the Sun. Earth will >be about at the orbit Mars is today...
>...I can't reference this claim right now

Without the need to reference, this can be seen quite clearly with a basic knowledge of energy consservation laws/ Keplerian motion- as the Sun ejects matter (in the form of losing outer shells of gas), it follows that the mass of the Sun decreases. Therefore to remain in orbit and still adhere to the conservation of energy and Kepler's laws the planets must adjust their orbits accordingly- as mass is lost from the system the planets must adopt a wider orbital path, or they'd all get a slap on the wrist from Kepler, Newton, Einstein and anyone else who has anything to do with dynamics.

TK

At the moment the experts don't know whether Earth will be absorbed by the Sun or not. Earth's orbit will indeed become larger, but nobody knows how much Sun mass will be blown into space. Moreover, there will be much more dust in the path that makes Earth slower. We simply don't know (yet).

>> The outer shell of the Sun will then explode
>> and move away.
>
> The shell has no energy source for an explosion,
> but it will be "blown away" like a wind.

That's a matter of definition.

>> The core will collapse further into a
>> super-dense cold star - a White Dwarf.
>
> Cold? Why would a dwarf be _white_ if it didn't
> have a surface temperature of 100000 C ? It will
> be initially hot, but veeery slooowly cool down
> to a brown dwarf, a dead and lonely piece of
> iron.

The surface temperature is rather hot indeed, however in its core it should be much colder than normal. I'm not totally sure, but no nuclear energy is produced anymore.

No-one has ever measured the output of radiation of so called fusion from the sun. This myth that the furnace is fusion is inspired by the fact there is no alternative widely accepted theory for the source of the solar heat.

A lot of the fundamentals to the science of cosmogyny depend on a layer of theories which like this one are unproven, unprovable and work well in theory. Only one problem (if you don't count the fact that almost all its radio emission is in a relatively narrow band from infra red to low ultra violet, where half the frequency is what you earthlings call "light") the specrum of the sun differs to the spectra produced in fusion radiation in all known experiments.

In the 1930's a great deal of nuclear physics was internationally discussed by the very few people that could understand it. In the '40's huge amounts of research went into it, culminating in the production of Hydrogen bombs.

Very little was open to public scrutiny until fairly recently. Most of what is, is layered in jargon and higher physics. And the theories we now accept about the radiation that we get from the sun has been foist on us almost fully fledged.

The ugly duckling does though resemble a severely mal-nourished ostrich.