The moon is locked into a death spiral which will eventually cause it to smash into Earth, an astronomer has warned.
This apocalyptic event is likely to be so devastating that it will turn the surface of our home world into a seething pit of red hot lava.
“The final end-state of tidal evolution in the Earth-Moon system will indeed be the inspiral of the Moon and its subsequent collision … into Earth,” Jason Barnes, a planetary scientist at the University of Idaho, told Forbes.
“The energy released in the merging would re-melt the Earth into a magma ocean.”
Sadly, humans won’t be around to see this disaster – because they will probably have been wiped out already.
According to Barnes’ theory, the moon will crash into Earth in about 65 billion years, which is about 59 billion years after everything on our planet has been burned alive in the death throes of the sun.
If our species manages to avoid being wiped out by nuclear war, doomsday space rocks or apocalyptic epidemics, we may live to see the day our closest star swallows up much of the solar system.
“Five billion years from now, the Sun will have grown into a red giant star, more than a hundred times larger than its current size,” Professor Leen Decin from the KU Leuven Institute of Astronomy said last year.
“It will also experience an intense mass loss through a very strong stellar wind. The end product of its evolution, 7 billion years from now, will be a tiny white dwarf star.
“This will be about the size of the Earth, but much heavier: one tea spoon of white dwarf material weighs about 5 tons.”
This article originally appeared on The Sun.
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