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And how is Sun going to gain more mass to have more gravity than it has today? It is a poorly written article.
by genman 3y ago
And how is Sun going to gain more mass to have more gravity than it has today? It is a poorly written article.
- mytailorisrich 3y agoIt won't. They're only saying that when the Sun becomes a white dwarf some remaining objects may be thrown close enough to be shredded: "For the rest of the solar system, some of the asteroids located between Mars and Jupiter, and maybe some of the moons of Jupiter may get dislodged and travel close enough to the eventual white dwarf to undergo the shredding process we have investigated." Agreed that this is less sensational than the title suggests.
- microtherion 3y agoBut still, why won't these objects get shredded before, since the Sun will have had the same mass all along? Wouldn't gravity remain more or less the same during the entire stellar evolution?
- BurningFrog 3y agoBecause they'd be engulfed by the sun before getting that close to the center?
- mytailorisrich 3y agoI know nothing about the topic but my best guess is that the white dwarf will have a mass comparable to the current Sun's mass but concentrated in a much smaller space, and so some objects may thus be able to orbit much closer and experience strong tidal forces as the gravitational well will be much steeper.
- microtherion 3y agoSo they would have been destroyed anyway, but instead of being swallowed by the Sun, they get ripped apart by gravity?
- pfdietz 3y agoWhat they glossed over was that after the Sun becomes a white dwarf, the remaining planets (and minor objects) will have orbits that can become unstable over time. One fate of objects on unstable orbits is to have their eccentricities pumped up to a point that they would pass very close to the white dwarf and be tidally disrupted. The fragments would then be on very elliptical orbits that would precess at different rates, leading to very high velocity collisions near the white dwarf, ultimately causing the remains to settle into a disk. Very small fragments would spiral in due to the Poynting-Robertson effect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting%E2%80%93Robertson_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poynting%E2%80%93Robertson_eff...
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]