Sun's Final Dance: Plasma Kicks Could Push It Across the Solar System

New research suggests Sun-like stars don’t simply fade away as they die; during the red-giant phase they eject plasma in asymmetric bursts that give the star tiny opposite-direction kicks. Over hundreds of thousands of years this creates a random-walk movement, with a Sun-like star experiencing thousands of such kicks and moving at a few thousand kilometers per hour. While the effect is subtle, it could help push the Sun’s outer layers to around Mars’ orbit, engulfing the inner planets in about five billion years, and it can also disrupt wide binary systems. In rarer cases, kicks might propel a star toward a companion, causing a collision. The findings from Caltech’s Jim Fuller (and colleagues) were presented at the American Astronomical Society meeting and submitted for publication.