When the Sun dies, Mercury and Venus will be swallowed up: the same fate will most likely befall the Earth. Asteroids in the main belt between Mars and Jupiter, as well as some of Jupiter's moons, will derail from their orbits and end up in pieces before falling into the dying star.
A truly catastrophic scenario, the one outlined by the study published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society by an international team coordinated by the University of Warwick, in Great Britain. The research is based on the observation of three white dwarfs, that is, three stars at the end of their life cycle, just like our Sun in about five billion years. The researchers monitored the three stars for 17 years, measuring the variations in brightness due to the chaotic transit of debris generated by the destruction of asteroids, moons and planets in orbit, in order to reconstruct the evolution of these planetary systems. The first white dwarf (ZTF J0328−1219) revealed traces of a serious catastrophic event that occurred around 2010.