Red Giant Stars 3.0

A dwarf star is much more different than a Red Giant star! By the name says, Red Giants are enormous in their size. The main sequence stars with masses between the range from 0.3 M_☉ to 8 M_☉ can evolve into Red giants. Does that mean our Sun can become a red giant? Yes, once our Sun has exhausted all its supply of hydrogen in its core (which can almost take 5 billion years), the star expand its outer surface 100 million to 1 billion kilometers in diameter which is 100 to 1000 times the size of the sun today! One of the biggest red giants ever discovered is VY Canis Majoris which is almost 1400 times bigger than our own Sun!

Since the diameter is very huge, the energy is spread across a large area and its surface temperatures are cooler having from 2,200 to 3,200 degree Celsius (which is half as hot as the sun at its current state). When a star becomes a red giant, it will start burning helium to carbon in its core for another couple of million years until helium runs out in its core.

At this condition, the star will not be dense enough to form other heavy elements like iron, resulting in not carrying out the further fusion process. Since there is no longer any fusion energy to stabilize gravity, the star will collapse in its core. At this point, the star shrinks again until the core obtains a new helium shell. When helium emerges it ignites the outer layer of the star and blows into forming a huge cloud of gas and dust known as Planetary nebula.

And what are these Planetary nebula are capable of? That’s takes a different article to discuss about!

Now, lets think deeper about a sun like star turning into a red giant. What effects could it cause to our solar system? A red giant 100 to 1000 times the current size of the Sun will engulf our planet without any dust particles to spare. With our current technology, it is impossible to escape from this disaster. In the future, it might be possible to escape this disaster with the upcoming techs.

A Chinese science-fiction film named “The Wandering Earth” directed by “Frant Gwo” released in the year 2019 had an amazing concept of technology that can migrate the Earth itself! The plot of the film exactly matches with our situation i.e. in the film, that was the time were our Sun has changed its state into a red giant star and threaten to engulf the Earth’s orbit. In order to preserve human civilization, they used enormous planetary thrusters running on fusion power known as Earth Engines or thrusters which are built across the planet to move the Earth from its orbit, out of the solar system to the Alpha Centauri system which is 4.2 light years away! The Earth Engines was the technology that was used in this film. I insist you to watch the film to know how people have adapted to the environment then and as Earth passes by Jupiter, our planet experiences a “gravitational spike” which causes earthquakes that disables many thrusters across the globe and starts to attract Earth dangerously close to Jupiter. And how the characters in the film rescue our planet is all about the film.

Though this technology is not needed now or for another 5.4 billion years, Earthlings have to face this situation in the future. Another possibility of escaping from this event will be that the orbit of Earth might change itself accordingly when our Sun becomes a red giant.

What do you think? Are we lucky enough to survive this? Or do you know for sure that our technology will save our future generations?!