Earth Science D Odd 10/21/15

Current Events     John Marshall

Naik, Gautam. "Far in Space, a Glance at How Earth May End." WSJ. N.p., 22 Oct. 2015. Web. 22 Oct. 2015.

I recently got the chance to read the article, “Far in Space, a Glance at How Earth May End,” by Gautam Naik. The article talks about a solar system in the constellation Virgo, 570 Light Years away, that is coming to the end of its life, where the star is about the same size as our Sun. This star that was  in the Red Giant stage and is now transitioning into a white dwarf, and by observing it scientists can see how this will affect the planets around it. The star is losing about 22 million pounds of its mass, meaning that this change is happening rapidly, and how you can imagine this is really off-setting the solar system. Right now scientist around the world at places like Bath University in England are observing a planet that is rapidly orbiting the star and is slowly disintegrating. They are using the Kepler telescope to observe this happening.

The reason that this event is so important to us is because it gives us some insight on how our Earth might end one day. Considering this stars proximity to the Sun in size, this star will have a similar life cycle to our Sun. In about five billion years, the Sun is projected to start its process in becoming a Red Giant, meaning it runs out of Helium to burn and starts burning  Hydrogen. The surface area of the Sun will rapidly expand after this, and if the Earth is not engulfed by the Sun in this process, it will likely end as the Sun transitions into a white dwarf star. Scientists have speculated for years that a white dwarf star could start to disintegrate planets in its solar system, but this is the first solid evidence. This discovery really gives scientists a good idea of how the Earth would end, a question asked from generation to generation.

Naik did a wonderful job on this article, because he really made such a complex topic easier to understand. He did a great job explaining things that the reader might not know and made it a lot more manageable to read. A lot of science articles are very hard to read simply because of the vocabulary or the topics that they are talking about, but Gautam Naik described everything so the reader could understand. He put facts in the article to back up what he was saying, and it really allowed the reader to understand the magnitude of what was happening. The article was very well written, but I felt that the author may have left out some important information. For example, I read the whole article and I could not find out the name of the star anywhere. Also, I wanted to know how many planets were in the solar system, but the article only talked about the one.