'The fate of Earth depends on a delicate balance': Our planet may survive the death of the sun after all, new models hint

Earth may survive the fiery death of the sun, even as our star engulfs the innermost planets, a new study using state-of-the-art models suggests.

The findings offer a potential alternative fate for our planet, which was thought to face certain death as the sun engulfs it in a thermonuclear inferno billions of years from now. As a yellow dwarf star, the sun is expected to have a relatively calm, 10 billion-year life. But in about 5 billion years, it will run out of hydrogen to fuse in its core and begin fusing hydrogen in its shell, causing it to expand enormously into a red giant star and then an even larger "AGB star," before it ultimately dies as a white dwarf.

Now, in a Letter to the Editor published June 19 in the journal Astronomy & Astrophysics, astronomers used stellar evolution models and observed a ne...