SOLAR SYSTEM : Source : Guardian Newspapers td., published in Hindu daily on 23.12.2006 Astronomers foresee the eventual
disaster is five billion years away. Sun will swell 200 times its present size.There will be no inner planet left. It is an exciting information to know. There is nothing in the
universe that is immortal. Like Humans dying in few decades, stars die ultimately after millions or billion of years or shrink to a insignificant level like an old person with advancement of age shrinks.Observation of a star system some 450 millions light years from
earth has revealed all that remains of a planetary system located around a star that was once eight times the size of the sun. Scientists have discovered a lonely dwarf star orbited by a small ring of metallic gas. The white dwarf is now a hundred times smaller than our sun, burning with a surface temperature 22,000 degrees C. It is giving a glimpse of our future according to a physicist at the University of Warwick.The same fate awaits the Sun. As its hydrogen fuel runs out the sun will eventually swell to 200 times its present size and at this stage it will destroy Mercury and Venus because of proximity and push the remaining planets out. The Sun therefore will contract into the smaller, more dense, white dwarf.In five to eight billion years, when the sun becomes a white dwarf, there will be no inner planets left. Asteroids, however, could be knocked towards the star by large planets, such as Jupiter.White dwarfs often exist by themselves in the galaxy and are often orbited byn clouds of gas. This will be the fate of our life giving sun eventually.The new discovery reveals that its disc of gas contains no hydrogen or helium, the two gases that make up more than 99 per cent of the universe. The only elements scientists spotted were calcium, iron and magnesium.So, there is going to be a day when all the living beings on the earth will perish and the earth will become barren and dry like many other stars in the Universe. But it is going to be 5 billion years away and much before that the every living being on the earth would have become extinct due to other adverse factors signs of which already have surfaced like pollution of air, water, depletion of ozone layer, warming up of oceans etc.So long as we are alive, every thing is important and meaningful. Once destroyed, is there any meaning and significance? The humans are noisy and short sighted in their character.