There Goes the Neighborhood...

Scientists using the Hubble telescope have found four white dwarf stars that they think used to have small rocky planets orbiting them. This might seem unimportant to you and me, except for two things:

1) One day in the distant future, our sun will become a white dwarf -- a very small, very dim and relatively cool star.

2) Earth is a small rocky planet.

Astronomers figure that the stars could be old and when they passed through their red-giant phase, the resulting gravitational changes affected the orbits of some of their planets. The shrinking down into a white dwarf further destabilized the planets and may have caused some of them to break apart, leaving the orbiting clouds that have been observed with the Hubble.

Sometime several billion years from now, our sun will run out of the fuel for the nuclear fusion it undergoes now and the changeover to burning other elements will cause a massive rapid expansion. Mercury and Venus will almost certainly be swallowed up in the new giant sun, and Earth might very well be also. Even if it survives, the white dwarf star that follows the red giant will not have the same gravitational pull that our sun does at its current mass, and so the planets' orbits will change. That change could stress them out so much they break apart.

I don't know about you, but I plan on buying some Martian real estate in case doctors solve the whole "finite life span" problem, so I can move if need be. I've got a pretty good deal with the same Nigerian bank that stores my multi-million dollar joint account with a late barrister in that country, so message me and I'll send you the contact info.