WORLD - Earth’s Ultimate Adios
A distant planet spiraling into its sun may give humanity a glimpse of the Earth’s ultimate end, astronomers found.
Kepler 1658b, located 2,600 light years away from Earth, is slowly spiraling toward its aging sun at the rate of 131 milliseconds a year, according to a study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. The exoplanet, the first ever observed by the Kepler space telescope in 2009, gives a hint as to how Earth may end in the distant future.
“Death-by-star is a fate thought to await many worlds and could be the Earth’s ultimate adios billions of years from now as our Sun grows older,” the Center for Astrophysics said in a statement, obtained by AFP.
“If it continues [spiraling] towards its star at the observed rate, the planet will collide with its star in less than three million years,” Shreyas Vissapragada, a postdoc at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and the study’s lead author, told the outlet.
-www.washingtonexaminer.com, 19 December 2022
Arno's Commentary
This article reminds us of a previously quoted excerpt from scientist Charles Seife’s book Decoding the Universe (copyright 2006, published by Penguin Books): “That’s probably not the first thing you want to read when you pick up a book, but it’s true. Humanity—and all life in the universe—is going to be wiped out. No matter how advanced our civilization becomes, no matter if we develop the technology to hop from star to star or live for six hundred years, there is only a finite time left before the last living creature in the visible universe will be snuffed out. The laws of information have sealed our fate, just as they have sealed the fate of the universe itself.”
The Bible gives a crystal-clear answer as to the future of planet earth: “Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat?” (2 Peter 3:12). Do we have reasons to be afraid, to worry, to be perplexed? Not at all, because for believers, verse 13 is the great comfort: “Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.”
Arno Froese is the executive director of Midnight Call Ministries and editor-in-chief of the acclaimed prophetic magazines Midnight Call and News From Israel. He has authored a number of well-received books, and has sponsored many prophecy conferences in the U.S., Canada, and Israel. His extensive travels have contributed to his keen insight into Bible prophecy, as he sees it from an international perspective.
