The dying sun could tear the solar system apart sooner than thought

The fate of our solar system is written in the stars—well, one star to be precise: the sun. Estimates of what the end will look like once the sun sheds much of its mass and ultimately dies vary widely. New research published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters suggests that the final curtain for some of the outer planets will arrive much sooner than previously thought, shrinking the timeline from a quintillion years down to roughly 1 billion years.