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Every one billion years, the sun
becomes 10% hotter. But here on what IF, we’re going to take billions of years and
condense the action into one month. Get ready, because we’re going to be moving
really fast this time. Instead of one billion years, it would only take four
days for the sun to become 10% hotter. This means you’ll see the earth engulfed by
the sun in just one month. That is if you’re still around to witness the final
event.
On day one, you’d be blissfully unaware of the tragedy about to befall the earth. Maybe it’s a little hotter, but that’s just the weather. It happens. But by day four, space agencies across the globe would be sounding the alarm bells. By this time, the sun would be about 10% brighter and hotter. And while 10% doesn’t sound like a lot, it will be the beginning of the end for us. As the sun heats up, more and more water from Earth’s surface will evaporate into the atmosphere. This will increase the greenhouse gas effect, causing global temperature to skyrocket. All of a sudden, it will become very humid, and very hot. But the Sun’s high-energy light would bombard the temperature, splitting those water molecules into hydrogen and oxygen. Earth will begin to lose its water. And you won’t be able to escape the lethal radiation on the earth’s surface. If you want to survive, you’ll have to go deep underground. But even under a protective layer of the earth’s soil, you won’t be safe for long. By day 16, the sun would be almost 40% brighter.
Our planet’s oceans will boil, and there won’t be any moisture
left in the atmosphere. The beautiful, lush earth that you grew up on will
become a hot, dry, barren rock. Around day 20, the sun would run out of hydrogen.
So instead, it will start to burn helium in its core. The sun is now a red
giant star and would expand rapidly while losing its mass. The sun’s
gravitational pull on earth would be weakened, and our planet would begin to
drift away from the expanding sun. But not far enough. According to researchers
Klaus-Peter Schroder and Robert C. Smith, the Earth would only have moved about
0.0002 astronomical units.
The sun is a hard thing to measure. It's a big ball of plasma (similar to a gas, but with electrons ripped off the atoms by extreme temperature), and measuring the dimensions of elastic fluids is a lot harder than for solids or liquids because there is no clear boundary. Measurement is indirect because it’s huge and it’s so hot you couldn’t get near it anyway. Instruments are more numerous and more precise every year. It is possible that the sun itself is the same size but the measurements are different, a bit like cancer rates appearing to rise as a result of rising detection rates. Changes in ongoing nuclear reactions may produce more or less heat, producing expansion or contraction for a while until equilibrium is reached for the new conditions. It might even be a cyclic thing, a dynamic equilibrium.
An astronomical unit is a distance between the earth
and the sun. While Earth is moving away from the encroaching sun, the red giant
would grow up to 1.2 AU in radius. The sun would be larger than the earth’s orbit.
It would swallow the planet whole. Once it’s inside the sun’s atmosphere, the earth
would collide with particles of gas spiral inward. And the earth wouldn’t be the
only casualty of the expanding sun. Mercury and Venus would be vaporized. The rings
of Saturn would melt. Pluto would become much warmer. And if there is a liquid
surface, and a thick atmosphere on this distant dwarf planet, it even might
become inhabitable. Unfortunately, 30 days doesn’t give the human race enough
time to prepare for such a catastrophic event. But if we had more time, like
billions of year’s worth, we could come up with an evacuation plan. But that’s
a story for another what IF.
