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Comment by flashman

As with everything in astronomy: it depends. Just because the star is longer-lived than the Sun doesn't mean its planets will remain habitable as long. Small stars have planets that orbit close and become tidally locked, possibly losing their water and atmosphere in tens or hundreds of millions of years. It will be a long, long time until Proxima Centauri dies – four trillion years by one estimate[1] – but its planet may be dead already.

Cheerfully, multicellular life on Earth only has somewhere between 600 and 800 million years left before the Sun gets too hot and all the carbon dioxide disappears from the atmosphere. But single-celled organisms will persist nearly another 3 billion years.[2]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proxima_Centauri [2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_the_far_future#Fut...

parent flashman 10 years ago

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