“We do not currently have a consensus about whether Earth could avoid being engulfed by the giant red sun in six billion years,” Zhang said.
“In any case, planet Earth will only be habitable for around another billion years, at which point Earth’s oceans would be vaporized by runaway greenhouse effect—long before the risk of getting swallowed by the red giant.”
Our planet’s fate is not totally clear, but the KMT-2020-BLG-0414 system provides evidence that worlds similar in size to Earth can survive the destructive nature of their dying stars.
Zhang notes that even if Earth does not survive the sun’s transition into a red giant, the outer solar system still might become a habitable zone, particularly around Jupiter and Saturn’s orbit.
Many of their moons could turn into ocean planets, where humanity might be able to flourish. The results of this study highlight the potential that gravitational microlensing has in discovering other exotic, hard-to-find planetary systems.
The study was published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
