Some interesting news from our Sun.
The 2024 total solar eclipse.
The first is that in 2024, precisely on April 8, a total solar eclipse will be visible from the Earth. The eclipse will enter North America in western Mexico around 12:10 pm (mountain time) and it will exit through southeastern Canada around 5:15 pm (newfoundland time). The eclipse will last longer and the sky will fall darker compared to the total sola eclipse of 2017. In North America it will be the last major eclipse for 20 years. This unique eclipse will be generated by the Moon very close to the Earth, so the Moon will appear particularly large and the eclipse particularly dark. Moreover, the Sun will be close to the solar maximum in 2024, in other word the peak of its 11-years activity cycle. So, lots of bright, plasma’s streamers will extend from the solar corona. This will allow scientists to study the Sun than ever before. There is also the possibility that the Solar Orbiter and the Parker Solar Orbiter will be able to collect solar material if they will be in a favorable position [1].
The Sun is becoming brighter.
The second information concerns the future of the Sun. As many stars, the Sun, during its aging, will become more and more bright and it will warm more and more the Earth. This could be the end of our planet, but luckily it will happen only in one billion years. The future of our solar system has been discussed in an interesting article published by Sean N. on arXiv.org. It is also plausible that the interaction between the Sun and the other planets will produce a migration of the planets outside the actual solar system. This is due to the movement of the “habitable zone”. Or another possibility is that the Earth will be captured by another star. There are different probabilities associated to all these scenarios, but it is sure that we will not be there anymore, and probably the Earth will be already empty from millenniums [2].
[1] https://www.sciencenews.org/article/total-solar-eclipse-sun-science-viewing-2024
[2] Future trajectories of the Solar System: dynamical simulations of stellar encounters within 100 au – Sean N. Raymond, Nathan A. Kaib, Franck Selsis, Herve Bouy; arXiv:2311.12171.
