Wonders of the Universe

THE DESTINY OF STARS

The arrow of time has been playing out in every corner of the Universe since the beginning of time. It dictates the destiny of everything; our civilisation, our planet, the Solar System, and all that lies beyond. The entropic march is inevitable and relentless. Nothing can resist the arrow of time, nothing can last forever, no star can shine without end and no planet can continue to turn. The Universe, bound by the laws of nature, must decay towards a radically different tomorrow.

We take for granted the sight of the Sun rising and setting on our horizon, but we now know its presence is not eternal.

Today, 13.7 billion years after the Universe began, we are living through the most productive era that our universe will ever know. The Stelliferous Era is a time of life and death, with the constant dance between gravity and nuclear fusion creating a dynamic, ever-changing landscape in the heavens. For a human being, for whom a century is a lifetime, the changes may appear slow, but be in no doubt that you are part of the Universe at its most vibrant. As we’ve watched the stories of stars like GRB 090423 play themselves out in the night sky, we have seen at first hand that no star can last forever. Every one of those brightly burning lights has a destiny as defined and as certain as our own, and this of course includes the star at the centre of our solar system.

The Sun was formed 4.57 billion years ago from a collapsing cloud of hydrogen and helium and a sprinkling of heavier elements. For the tiniest fraction of this time, humans have marked the passing of the days as it rose and set, and surely considered it to be an eternal presence. It was only during the twentieth century that we discovered the Sun’s fires must one day dim

The computer-generated image shows how dramatically different the Sun will look in our heavens as it dies and dims.