Sun’s future threatens outer planets

In about five billion years, the Sun will exhaust its hydrogen fuel and expand into a red giant, a massive and luminous star that will likely swallow Mercury and Venus. Earth may not escape this fate either, as the Sun’s expansion could engulf it as well.

Sun’s collapse creates chaotic conditions

After becoming a red giant, the Sun will eventually collapse into a white dwarf, an extremely dense stellar remnant. Previous estimates suggested that planets beyond Earth’s orbit would remain stable through this transformation, but new simulations challenge this assumption.

Simulations show planets may not survive

Astrophysicists, including Konstantin Batygin, simulated the fate of the giant planets after the Sun’s death. Their findings, published in October 2026 in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, suggest that Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune would not survive the Sun’s death due to violent and asymmetric mass ejections from the star.

Mass loss disrupts planetary orbits

According to the simulations, in 90% of the scenarios, the outer solar system disintegrated within less than three billion years after the formation of the white dwarf. The orbits of the planets would cross, leading to cascading ejections or collisions, with no configuration guaranteeing the survival of the quartet beyond an additional six billion years.

New models revise previous assumptions

Previous models assumed the Sun would lose its mass smoothly and continuously, leading to predictions of an extremely long lifespan for the outer solar system. However, the new simulations show that this lifespan is reduced by about a billion times due to the jerky nature of stellar mass loss.

Newton’s old idea finds new support

Isaac Newton had previously questioned the long-term stability of the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn. This hypothesis was largely ignored for centuries, but the new studies bring it back into focus, identifying the jolts of the dying star itself as the primary cause of terminal instability.

Findings apply to other stars

The implications of these findings extend beyond our solar system. Thousands of stars similar to the Sun are scattered throughout the Milky Way, and all will end in a similar manner. Observations of white dwarfs surrounded by planetary debris could validate these predictions in the coming decades.