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The sun will grow to a red giant in a billion years or so. The earth will possibly be swallowed by it but at least in a few hundred million years earth will b
by spaetzleesser 6y ago
The sun will grow to a red giant in a billion years or so. The earth will possibly be swallowed by it but at least in a few hundred million years earth will be so hot that oceans boil off and life will be impossible on earth. I hope I got the numbers right...
- bluedevil2k 6y agoBoil off where? What would happen to the water vapor if it floats off the Earth into the vacuum of space? Pulled in by the Sun's gravity and forever lost?
- ardit33 6y agoThink Venus.... Scorched surface and lots of hot gases above it
- bluedevil2k 6y agoThere's no water vapor on Venus though. At a certain point in the atmosphere, wouldn't it be cool enough and pressure low enough to make clouds still? Maybe they move around the Earth to the cool side away from the Sun?
- ben_w 6y agoWater disassociates into hydrogen and oxygen in UV light, and hydrogen gas move faster than escape velocity, even at current atmospheric temperatures. Ok, so it is more complicated than that, the speed of any atom or molecule is a Maxwellian distribution, but enough move fast enough that it’s an acceptable approximation, especially over these time scales.
- theli0nheart 6y agoPer Wikipedia, hydrogen exhaustion will begin in about 5 billion years from now. > The Sun does not have enough mass to explode as a supernova. Instead it will exit the main sequence in approximately 5 billion years and start to turn into a red giant. As a red giant, the Sun will grow so large that it will engulf Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun