How and when will the Sun die? The terrible answer is revealed.
The main source of light and life on Earth is the Sun. However, if you compare it with other stars in the universe, our Sun is just an ordinary star. In fact, it is a rather small star. And there are about 100 billion stars and that’s just in our galaxy, the Milky Way. And just like every other star, the 4.5 billion-year-old Sun has an expiration date! But when will the Sun die? And what will it look like after its demise? ScienceAlert’s latest report has revealed some shocking predictions about what the last days of the Sun and our solar system will look like.
It is thought that the Sun, upon death, will turn into a planetary nebula, a glowing cosmic bubble of gas and dust. In 2018, an international team of astronomers discovered that a planetary nebula resembles a corpse of the sun.
From observations based on other stars, it is predicted that the Sun will die in 10 billion years.
During this phase, the Sun will go through several phases. “In about 5 billion years, the Sun will turn into a red giant. The star’s core will contract, but its outer layers will expand out into the orbit of Mars, engulfing our planet in the process. If it’s even still there,” ScienceAlert reports.
But humans may not be alive until then! Incredibly, the study suggested that humanity has only about 1 billion years on Earth because the Sun is increasing its luminosity every billion years by about 10%. That increased rate has the potential to end all life on Earth. The sun, which controls the weather, ocean currents, seasons and climate, and helps plants survive through photosynthesis, burns everything! The oceans will start to evaporate, while the surface will become too hot.
“When a star dies, it ejects a mass of gas and dust – known as its crust – into space. This shell could be half the mass of the star. This indicates the core of the star. the star, which, at this point in the life of the active star, runs out of fuel, eventually turns off and before dying. Only then does the hot core cause the ejected shell to shine brightly for about 10,000 years – a short period of time in astronomy. This is what makes planetary nebulae visible,” explained one of the study’s authors, Albert Zijlstra.
