Our Sun Will Turn Into A Giant Crystal Orb In 10 Billion Years

A new study has found out that when a white dwarf star reaching the end of its life, it will lose its heat and turn into a giant and extremely heavy crystal orb. What concerns us here is that our own Sun is a white dwarf star and in 10 billion years, it will face this same transformation.

According to Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, a lead researcher at the University of Warwick, this transition happens to all white dwarf stars sooner or later during their lifetime but the bigger the star, the earlier this occurs. Our galaxy has billions of stars like this which have already transformed and now they are, for the most parts, crystal orbs.

This research paper was published in Nature, a multidisciplinary journal on science and is the result of a study from Gaia, a space vessel of European Space Agency.

The observation from Gaia shows that there are a large number of white dwarf stars sporting brightnesses and colors that scientists cannot explain the cause using their mass or age. The only explanation experts can find is that these stars are undergoing a transformation process into a crystal that happens inside out.

The research also indicates that when the process is complete, these stars will become a sphere with the outer layer made up of carbon crystal, which resembles the diamond while the core is crystallized oxygen. This might be a quite gloomy vision showing that our universe is getting old but it serves as a concrete confirmation for a theory that has been troubling astronomers for a long time.

Tremblay said that this study was a first direct proof that dwarfs do harden into the crystal, in other words, they turn from liquid to solid. Half a century ago, there was a prediction that in the future, scientists would see a growing number of these stars with distinctive color and brightness because of this hardening process. It was not until these readings that this theory is confirmed.