Although the Sun appears like a predictable object, with the Earth stable in its rotating motion, this is only an appearance. In fact, the average distance between the Earth and the Sun is not constant from year to year. There are differences about the average long-term changes. In which direction?

Actually the sun is standing moving away from Earth slowly. On average, according to NASA, the Earth is located 150 million kilometers from the Sun. However, its orbit isn’t exactly circular: It’s slightly elliptical, or elliptical, so the distance can vary from 147.1 million to 152 million kilometers, according to NASA. This distance is increasing for two reasons: the loss of the sun’s mass and the effects of tides on Earth.

The nuclear fusion reactions that power the Sun convert mass into energy, according to Einstein’s famous equation E = mc^2. Since the sun is constantly producing energy, it is constantly losing mass. Over the sun’s remaining life — estimated at about 5 billion years, according to NASA (opens in new tab) — models of star evolution predict that the sun will lose about 0.1% of its total mass before. To start dying, Brian DiGiorgio, an astronomer at the University of California, Santa Cruz, told Live Science in an email.

While 0.1% may not seem like much, DiGiorgio said, “that’s a big block.” “It’s about the same mass as Jupiter.” Jupiter, in turn, is about 318 times the mass of Earth, according to the Exploratorium (opens in a new tab) in California.

The pull of gravity is proportional to its mass. As the sun loses its mass, its attraction to the earth weakens, It made our planet move away from our star by about 6 centimeters per year. A neglected but objective fact. Let’s move on to consider the second factor.

Just as the moon’s gravity causes tides on Earth, Earth’s gravity also pulls on the sun. This extends the side of the Sun toward the Earth, causing a “tidal bulge,” Brett Scheringhausen, professor of physics and astronomy at Beloit College in Wisconsin, wrote on the Ask an Astronomer at Cornell University page. in a new tab).

According to NASA, the Sun rotates on its axis approximately once every 27 days (Opens a new tab). Since this rotation is faster than the roughly 365 days it takes the Earth to complete one orbit around the Sun, the tidal bulge that Earth generates on the Sun is in front of the Earth. Scheringhausen noted that the bulge’s mass is related to the gravitational pull that pushes the Earth forward in its orbit and away from the Sun, with a similar effect causing Earth’s moon to slowly move away from our planet. However, the influence of tides is very minimal, only 0.0003 cm per year.

So everything is almost fine. There is a departure, but is it very slow and almost not noticeable? There are no similar problems, in our relationship with the Sun: evolutionary models predict that the energy emitted by the Sun increases by 6% every billion years, so, gradually, over a very long period, the Sun will continue to literally boil the oceans on Earth, making them uninhabitable.

this is life? Which environmentalists protect? However, it will disappear, whether it’s carbon dioxide or not, unless we take a very different path to environmental austerity and energy containment. The technological and industrial push that is accelerating development is allowing man, but life in general, to separate itself from the earth and spread abroad.