The end is near! Many people ask when the planet Earth will end. The As the Sun gets older and starts to run low on fuel, it will get hotter. In about 1.5 billion years or so it will be hot enough to evaporate all of the fresh water and all of the oceans. All life, including humans and cockroaches and everything else, will die off. There will be no more trees, no more people, no more anything. Earth will become a barren rock orbiting the Sun.
Even though it will be devoid of all life, the Earth itself will survive. Unlike the life that once lived on it’s surface.
Then, in about 4 or 5 billion years the Sun will run low on hydrogen fuel and it will expand to a red giant.
In this phase of our star, it will become large enough to swallow Mercury and Venus. The extreme heat will destroy them, as they slowly orbit deeper into the Sun. The new Sun will grow dangerously close to Earth’s orbit. Scientists cannot say for sure whether the Sun will engulf the Earth too.
If Earth doesn’t end by the red giant, it will survive for many billions of years, long after the Sun starts to cool off. The now huge Sun will slowly shrink to a star known as a white dwarf. There will be an empty, scorched planet Earth orbiting a dead star for a trillion years.
