The giant planets may face a much more violent future than scientists once expected. A September 2026 study suggests the dying Sun could disturb their orbits enough to trigger severe instability. The crucial context: this is research into the solar system’s fate billions of years from now.
What changed in the new solar-system study?
The paper by Konstantin Batygin, Jim Fuller and Fred C. Adams replaces smooth solar mass loss with uneven ejections that kick the star and disturb planetary orbits.
About 40% of simulated systems suffered disruption or violent scattering before white-dwarf formation. Roughly 90% destabilized within three billion years.
Those are simulated outcomes, not a countdown. Submitted September 11, the paper is listed as accepted by The Astrophysical Journal Letters.
When will the Sun become a white dwarf?
NASA’s overview of the Sun places that transformation roughly five billion years in the future. As the Sun ages, it will expand into a red giant before ending as a white dwarf. NASA says the expansion will engulf Mercury and Venus, and possibly Earth.
That sequence is essential to interpreting the headline. A time measured after white-dwarf formation starts after a profound transformation of the Sun. It does not start this weekend.
The Sun already accounts for about 99.8% of the solar system’s mass, NASA explains, and its gravity keeps planets and smaller bodies in orbit. Changing that central mass changes the gravitational setting in which those orbits evolve.
Why “sooner” can still mean an almost unimaginable time
Astronomy routinely compares timescales far beyond a human lifetime. A billion years is 1,000 million years. A result can dramatically shorten a previous theoretical estimate and still describe an extraordinarily distant event.
A useful way to read stories like this is to separate three questions: what physical process changed in the model, when that process occurs, and whether the result is a range of simulated possibilities or an observed event. Combining those questions into one doomsday headline loses the science.
The photograph is a real view of Jupiter
The featured image is a true-colour mosaic built from Cassini spacecraft photographs taken on December 29, 2000. It shows Jupiter’s clouds and Great Red Spot; it does not depict the future disruption explored in the research.
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Image credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute, PIA04866.