Watch the sun literally melt a piece of rock in this new video
Earth will not be a pleasant place to live when the sun is dying.
As the sun blows out into a red giant, expanding its outer layers farther out into the solar system after the fuel in its core runs out, the temperature on our planet would increase, turning our planet into a ball of molten rock.
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This won't happen for billions of years, but a new clip from the Science Channel series Space's Deepest Secrets shows what that melted rock could look like on a much smaller scale.
In the video, scientist Eva Villaver uses the world's largest solar furnace in France to mimic the radiation Earth would experience as the sun turns into a red giant.
The furnace, which is composed of about 10,000 mirrors, works like a huge magnifying glass, according to the Science Channel.
Villaver directed the heat from the furnace at a piece of rock and effectively liquified it.
The furnace created a beam of light that is 3,000 times more intense than it is naturally, which is about the increase in radiation expected when the sun becomes a red giant, according to the Science Channel.
"We are focusing the light of the sun in a beam and trying to see what will be the effect on a rock because the Earth is a rock floating around the sun," Villaver said.
In the video, the rock bursts and liquifies quite quickly after being put under the concentrated beam of light. It starts smoking almost immediately, shooting off sparks and eventually turning into something like a puddle beneath the light beam.
New episodes of Space's Deepest Secrets premiere at 10 p.m. ET on the Science Channel.
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Miriam Kramer worked as a staff writer for Space.com for about 2.5 years before joining Mashable to cover all things outer space. She took a ride in weightlessness on a zero-gravity flight and watched rockets launch to space from places around the United States. Miriam received her Master's degree in science, health and environmental reporting from New York University in 2012, and she originally hails from Knoxville, Tennessee. Follow Miriam on Twitter at @mirikramer.
