{"id":276,"date":"2008-02-18T00:20:45","date_gmt":"2008-02-18T05:20:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=276"},"modified":"2008-02-18T00:20:49","modified_gmt":"2008-02-18T05:20:49","slug":"saving-earth-from-the-suns-expansion","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/?p=276","title":{"rendered":"Saving Earth from the Sun&#8217;s expansion"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/s-expansion.jpg\" title=\"Sun\u2019s expansion\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2008\/02\/s-expansion.thumbnail.jpg\" alt=\"Sun\u2019s expansion\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>About 7 billion years from now the Sun will have swelled into a red giant with a radius larger than Earth&#8217;s orbit. We&#8217;re doomed. Or so we thought.<\/p>\n<p>A ray of hope has been thrown our way by astronomers who say that  as the Sun expands it will lose a significant portion of its mass (perhaps almost a third)  in the form of a solar wind that is blown away. And as the mass drops, the radius of Earth&#8217;s orbit should increase.<\/p>\n<p>That complicates things so Robert Connon Smith from the University of Sussex and a pal took on the task of determining whether this new thinking means Earth will survive or not.<\/p>\n<p>And the answer is&#8230;cue drum roll.. that the planet will still be engulfed.<\/p>\n<p>But they offer another ray of hope. Earth&#8217;s angular momentum around the smaller Sun need only be increased by 8 per cent  to avoid engulfment and that, says Smith, could be achieved by engineering a series of asteroid swingbys that gradually lift us into a wider orbit.<\/p>\n<p>If we start planning now, there&#8217;s hope for Mother Earth yet.<\/p>\n<p>Ref:  <a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/abs\/0801.4031\">arxiv.org\/abs\/0801.4031<\/a>: Distant Future of the Sun and Earth Revisited<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>About 7 billion years from now the Sun will have swelled into a red giant with a radius larger than Earth&#8217;s orbit. We&#8217;re doomed. Or so we thought. A ray of hope has been thrown our way by astronomers who say that as the Sun expands it will lose a significant portion of its mass [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-276","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-hellraisin","category-seein-the-light"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/arxivblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}