Are you just so sick of all the positivity in the world right now???

Well, I have a paper out today just for you! It describes the eventual end of the Solar System.

***Fortunately, It’s not going to happen for another ~100 Billion Years***

https://arxiv.org/abs/2009.07296 

In about ~7 billion years the Sun will die off, concluding nuclear fusion, and shed off about half of its mass, becoming a white dwarf.

This pre-retirement weight-loss will ensure Mercury, Venus, and Earth meet a fiery death. (Mars... maybe it lives? It's not important here.)

Regardless, the gas giants will be fine! However, their orbital radius will expand by nearly a factor of 2.

In the process of expanding, Jupiter and Saturn will be captured into a 5:2 mean-motion resonance.

The reduced mass of the Sun and the expanded orbits of the giant planet greatly weakens the gravitational pull on these remaining planets. Thus, external stellar flybys can really start to mess stuff up.

So that mean-motion resonance I mentioned, here is where it becomes important. An external stellar perturbation pushes and pulls Jupiter and Saturn in and out of resonance, causing the orbits to act very chaotic.

This chaotic motion, triggers large-scale instability for the remaining planets. Basically everyone jets, because Jupiter and Neptune are too drunk. Eventually even Neptune has had enough, leaving Jupiter to hang out all alone.

Jupiter is likely the last planet remaining after this instability. Orbiting alone... oh so alone.

Eventually another close encounter external flyby puts Jupiter out of its misery (around 100 billion years from now), leaving the Sun a planet-less star.

Shout out to my co-authors @kbatygin and Fred Adams for their continuous support on this project.

***Alternative Ending: A stellar flyby pushes Jupiter closer to the Sun and remains tightly bound like WD 1856+534****