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+--- Thread: Article The Moon will return to Earth to die in 7.6-Billion years. Here’s how it may happen. (/thread-15508.html)
The Moon will return to Earth to die in 7.6-Billion years. Here’s how it may happen. - C C - Feb 26, 2024
https://thedebrief.org/the-moon-will-return-to-earth-to-die-in-7-6-billion-years-heres-how-it-may-happen/
EXCERPT: In 7.6 billion years, the Sun is predicted to expand and engulf the Earth during its final evolution as a red giant. Within hundreds of millennia, after the Sun’s photosphere gets close to Earth, the drag of the Earth on the solar envelope will cause it to spiral into the core of the Sun. But long before it gets there, the same drag will cause the Moon to spiral quickly in its orbit towards the Earth.
By then, the Moon will appear twenty times bigger in our sky at a distance of about twenty thousand kilometers from Earth, and it would be tidally disrupted into a stream of rocks and dust around the planet resembling Saturn’s rings. The drag of these fragments on the envelope of the Sun will bring them quickly down to Earth, well before the Earth gets to the core of the dying Sun.
Eventually, the Earth will merge with the core of the Sun and join the metallic sphere that will condense there as a newly-born white dwarf. The white dwarf remnant will carry about three-fifths of the mass of the Sun and have a radius comparable to that of the Earth.
Terrestrial life as we know it would be eliminated long before the return of the Moon to Earth, within 1-2 billion years from now, when the brightening Sun will boil off all oceans on Earth... (MORE - missing details)
RELATED (wikipedia): Formation of the Moon