Scientists Predict Solar System’s Collapse Will Occur Far Earlier Than Expected

Published on 02/10/2026 – 16:50 GMT+2

The outer planets of the solar system will be plunged into chaos roughly a billion years after the Sun’s demise, a new study reveals, slashing their predicted lifespan by a factor of a billion.

Previous estimates suggested the giant planets’ orbits could remain stable for about a quintillion years—far exceeding the current age of the universe.

Researchers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) examined how the Sun’s gradual death would affect the outer planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune.

It was once thought, even by Isaac Newton, that the Sun would shed its mass smoothly as it aged, first becoming a red giant and later a white dwarf.

Under that scenario, Earth, Venus, and Mercury would be swallowed by the expanding red giant, while Mars would survive, orbiting far enough to avoid engulfment.

Earlier work indicated the outer planets would endure this phase, with their orbits expanding to roughly twice their present size as the Sun loses mass, and that their eventual disruption would only come from passing stars tens to hundreds of billions of years in the future.

The new findings overturn that view. Instead, the outer planets will be thrown into disarray about one billion years after the Sun becomes a white dwarf—still billions of years away.

When the Sun reaches the white‑dwarf stage, it will quickly cool and shrink to roughly half its current diameter, but the process will be far from smooth.

The study argues that the Sun will lose mass in violent, random bursts—so‑called “stochastic kicks”—rather than through a steady, gentle outflow.

The new findings indicate that the outer planets will be thrown into disorder roughly one billion years after the Sun becomes a white dwarf, which remains billions of years in the future.

At 4.57 billion years old, the Solar System has about five billion years left before the Sun swells into a red giant. Scientists had long assumed the giant planets would vastly outlive the Sun by an almost unimaginable margin.

The research relied on high‑performance supercomputers and hundreds of detailed N‑body simulations, with no artificial intelligence used.

The team built a virtual model of the Sun, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, letting the supercomputers compute their velocities and positions over billions of years.

What set this analysis apart was the implementation of a mass‑loss model for the dying Sun that featured random, violent, episodic ejections; hundreds of model runs were examined to reach a robust conclusion.

The results appear in the paper “Terminal Instability of the Solar System Triggered by Stochastic Solar Mass Loss,” published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

Source link