Something is very wrong with our Sun.
It’s turned into
into a spinning lighthouse of death.
Many stars go out with a bang,
exploding in brilliant supernovas.
But our Sun
has gone straight to becoming a pulsar,
sometimes called a neutron star.
You could take this as some good news.
The Sun exploding would obliterate Earth
and take nearly the rest of the Solar System along with it.
But now that it’s a neutron star,
the Sun would be among the densest objects
in the Universe.
And one of about 200,000 pulsars in the Milky Way.
Shrinking itself about 70,000 times
the size it used to be,
Our Sun wouldn’t be much bigger than
a small city at 10 km (12.5 mi) across.
And it would be spinning very fast.
If it’s anything like a pulsar located in the Virgo constellation,
it could make about 161 rotations every second.
Oh, and it would also shoot beams of deadly radiation
directly toward the Earth every few seconds.
Or even milliseconds.
With all this radiation beaming down, you don't really have much time.
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I did! And just in time for my vacation in France. Très bien!
Too bad I won't enjoy my new language for long because the Earth is about to get fried.
OK, the first thing you'd notice would be that things
suddenly got a lot darker.
Our Sun would emit almost no visible light.
But you’d still be able to catch quick glimpses of it.
Though only for the extremely brief moment that its pulse of energy
is directly pointing at us.
The Sun would now be like a pulsing lighthouse
at the center of our Solar System.
This eternal darkness would cause a lot of problems back here on Earth.
There would be no more photosynthesis.
Trees would no longer be able to produce oxygen,
and crops wouldn't grow.
So animals and humans
would be on the brink of mass starvation.
But there would be good news.
Astronomers have found exoplanets existing in a pulsar's habitable zone.
So maybe,
just maybe, you'd have a chance to survive this.
“Run OJ, run.”
Especially because the habitable zone of a pulsar
could be nearly as large as a normal star.
That would mean it could still be possible
for liquid water to exist on Earth's surface.
But this liquid water would only be able to exist
thanks to our warm atmosphere,
trapping energy from the Sun.
And while there wouldn't be much visible light,
there would be a lot of radiation.
That’s because neutron stars
have incredibly strong magnetic fields.
This would cause beams of X-rays and gamma rays
to shoot out from the Sun’s poles.
Yeah, and this would be very bad news.
All this radiation would be highly lethal.
In order to prevent it from reaching the Earth's surface,
our atmosphere would need to be thicker.
Maybe as thick as
one million times what it is today.
If you managed to pump enough air into the atmosphere
to reach this desired thickness,
you’d have to get used to living with an atmospheric pressure
as intense as the deepest parts of the ocean.
It would be like going down 10 km (6.2 mi)
to the bottom of the Mariana Trench.
But you wouldn’t be able to get close to that depth
before you’d be completely crushed.
Before you even hit the halfway point
your eardrums would rupture
and your lungs would fill with blood and collapse.
But you might not need to worry about this.
Because Earth wouldn't be able to hold
such a dense atmosphere in place.
The relentless radiation would just blast it away.
And if enough of the atmosphere disappeared,
the liquid water on Earth's surface
would eventually boil away.
And that would be the guaranteed demise of human life on this
once habitable space rock.
Which makes me think
what would happen if the oceans simply boiled away?
Well, that sounds like a story
for another WHAT IF.