IS this what the end of days looks like after the Sun has swallowed Earth up?
Fear not, we’ve got some time to go – scientists predict the Sun will die in about five billion years, at which point it will swell into a huge Red Giant before eventually leaving behind a dense ball of ash.
But if you want an idea of what the ghost of our solar system might look like, new images from another star paint a very vivid picture.
Nasa has revealed snaps of Helix Nebula, a dying star much like our own Sun.
Helix Nebula – or Eye of God Nebula – is one of the closest dying stars to Earth, located 650 light–years away.
The breathtaking shot gives a glimpse of how things might end for Earth and our solar system.
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It shows blistering winds of rapid-moving hot gas from the dying star as they collide with slower, colder shells of dust and gas that were shed earlier in its life.
Nasa took the photo using its powerful James Webb Space Telescope.
We’ve seen Helix Nebula before but this is a deeper, more detailed view than those taken by the old Hubble Telescope and retired Spitzer Space Telescope.
There’s also a bright white dwarf, the leftover core of the dying star, that lies right at the heart of the nebula, out of the frame of Webb’s snap.
However, while one thing ends new life could rise from the ashes.
“The image reveals how stars recycle their material back into the cosmos, seeding future generations of stars and planets,” Nasa said.
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It’s been a busy few days for Sun news, having only just revealed incredible never-before-seen footage of the Sun by staging an “artificial eclipse”.
The European Space Agency‘s Proba-3 mission used a pair of spacecraft orbiting Earth to pull it off.
This enabled scientists to see previously impossible views of Earth‘s star, which you can see in the video above.
