Ways our Earth can end

Our gorgeus planet resides in a beautiful universe. But today we will look at how the universe can cause our planet to end.

Published in

Spacetime

7 min readJun 17, 2023

Our Earth had a beginning and definitely has an end. We are not sure how it will happen but one day the Earth will be no more. Let’s explore some ways our beloved planet can come to an end, in light of astronomy and the universe!

Asteroid

Asteroids are huge chunks of rocks floating around our solar system. To give you an idea of how huge — let me tell you how they were formed. Our solar system came into existence about 4.5 billion years ago, when the solar nebula was hosting a cloud of violent gases. The pressurized enraging of these gases, along with the necessary chemical reactions, gave rise to 9 planets, the sun and the moon. But they also gave rise to something other than that. Some rocky lands came out of that nebula, which were not big enough to be either classified as a planet or a moon. They are called asteroids.

These gigantic mini planets or mini moons, are floating across our solar system. Every now and then, there is an event in which an asteroid looms near the earth and it is anticipated to hit it. There is a special class of these objects (asteroids, comets, meteors) whose trajectories lie close to the earth — they are called Near Earth Objects, NEOs for short. Some of these NEOs are as big as actual cities.

66 million years ago, asteroid Chicxulub crashed into earth and caused the dinosaurs to go extinct! Events like this have low but not zero probability of happening again. For us astronomers who keep a lookout for the latest events, we know how frequently an asteroid can crash into our planet and obliterate it into smithereens.

Collision with Andromeda

We reside in the vast Milky Way Galaxy. Most of the stars that we see at night are from our very own Milky Way. The closest neighbor to Milky Way is the Andromeda Galaxy, which is 200,000 lightyears in diameters, across! Our Milky Way itself is 150,000 lightyears in diameters. The collision of the two galaxies is anticipated somewhere in the future ahead, not likely in our lifetime, but it is still anticipated.

What will the collision with the neighboring Galaxy do? There are many possibilities. The most obvious is the shift in huge gravitational forces. Our galaxy is glued together with gravity. The Earth rotates around the Sun due to the gravitational pull of the sun. The moon orbits the Earth for the same reason, and asteroids move in their orbits for the same reason as well. As mega-gigantic bodies from Andromeda cross paths with our Milky Way, the gravitational pull from these bodies can be so large that it can render the current gravities between our planets and stars negligible.

This can result in Earth moving out of Sun’s orbit, or Moon moving out of Earth’s orbit. To tell you the truth, our existence is held together in such subtle ways, that if one minor pint of deviation occurs in the way that Sun moves or the way Moon moves, it can result in the end of mankind. Sun moves a little farther away from us and we wouldn’t be able to grow crops or have lights. You can say that we can eat only animals — fair enough — but what will the animals eat? Not only that, if Sun moves away from its position, the other planets’ trajectories will also dangerously change — and any planet can just collide with us! Not to mention that we can easily freeze into non-existence.

Stellar collision

Speaking of collisions, if any star comes close to our solar system, we are doomed. The closest star to our solar system resides in the Alpha Centauri, which is about 4 lightyears away from us. That means it takes 4 years for light to emanate from that star and reach us — that’s how far it is. Sun is about 8 1/2 light-minutes away from us. The point is, it’s far! The closest star is quite far from us. Would it be any closer, it can can burn us to ashes.

Why would it burn us? Because there are stars far, far, far bigger than the Sun. Sun is actually a very small star — compared to other stars. There are Super Red Giants. The cute stars that we see in the night sky, like Betelgeuse, are actually very big. They only appear small because they are so further away. Not only these stars looming near us can burn us, but if a Supernova explosion occurs that is big enough to reach us, it can destroy us as well. Supernova is the death of a giant star. It is predicted that if a supernova explosion occurs in proximity of 25 lightyears from us, it would result in the loss of our atmosphere — leading to our immediate extinction!

Only another star looming in closer can cause this impact — now think about a star colliding with our sun…

Moon closing the distance

If for some reason, the Moon — yes, the Moon — the cute little lamp that glows the night sky in its full glory — if it happened to move close to us, it can cause a massive destruction on our planet. The tides in our oceans and seas are caused by the gravitational pull of the moon. Once again, it is a great subtilty that the Moon is in a very unique distance away from us that the tides do not go so high. If Moon was any closer than it is, then there would be massive Tsunamis and floods. Our planet would become a water world. The shift in temperatures would cause the mantle of the earth to heat up abnormally — resulting in tremendous earthquakes.

Black Hole

This is the most interesting — and possibly the most scary. I can write a whole book about it! So there are huge, huge stars — about 30 times the size of our sun. When these huge Supergiants implode, a good part of the star clamps inwards into its core. So the once Supergiant, now becomes the size of New York City… or even the size of an atom! So black holes are the densest materials in the universe! The pull of gravity from a black hole is so massive, that even photons (light particles) cannot escape it.

Since light cannot escape a black hole, everything inside the black hole up to its outer rim appears as darkness. Black holes suck entire planets, moons and suns! The more things it wallops, the bigger it gets. There is a black hole at the center of almost every galaxy. A black hole resides in center of our very own Milky Way, in the Sagittarius constellation. It is known as Sagittarius A*.

What’s inside a black hole? We don’t know. What we do know is, time behaves differently in a black hole than anywhere else. The gravitational pull of the black hole is so huge, that it curves the Spacetime continuum. So if a person is standing at the edge of a black hole, he may appear to you as just being walloped into blackness — but to him, that walloping can take hundreds of years! A black hole can eat up our Sun, Jupiter and Mars for breakfast, Saturn and Neptune for Lunch and Earth for dinner — keep doing it for only a few weeks or months — and it leaves no remnants on the plate!

Scientists also believe that our universe may just be something inside one black hole — and that we are living in a multiverse of black holes (bangs head)! This is a topic of great interest, at least to me, and a lot can be talked about it.

Conclusion

Our universe is beautiful, lively and lovely. But it is held together via great subtilities. We saw today how a small tweak in the way things run can destroy our beloved planet — and us along with it. This makes us appreciate how blessed and privileged we are, as even just a race of existence.

Personal Opinion

Personally, I would love to see the Andromeda coming close to us. It would be very cool! Plus, I think we may end by getting walloped into a black hole! But I don’t know for sure, it could be anything!