Who Said the Sun Will Shine on Us Again
When will the dominicus die?
If y'all worry near when the sun will die, never fear: that moment is billions of years away.
The sunday gives energy to life on Earth, and without this star, we wouldn't exist here. But even stars accept limited lifetimes, and someday our sunday will die.
Yous don't need to worry about this solar death someday soon, though. Like all stars, a churning fusion engine fuels the dominicus, and it still has a lot of fuel left — about five billion years' worth.
Related: What's inside the sun? A star tour from the inside out
Why volition the sun die?
Stars like our sun form when a huge deject of gas (mostly hydrogen and helium) grows so large that it collapses under its ain weight. The pressure is so high in the center of that collapsing mass of gas that the estrus reaches unimaginable levels, with temperatures so hot that hydrogen atoms lose their electrons.
Those naked hydrogen atoms then fuse together into helium atoms, and that reaction releases enough free energy to counter the intense pressure of gravity collapsing the cloud of gas. The battle between gravity and the energy from fusion reactions fuels our sun and billions of other stars in our galaxy and beyond.
But in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen. Our star is currently in the virtually stable phase of its life bike and has been since the formation of our solar system, nearly iv.5 billion years ago. Once all the hydrogen gets used up, the sun will grow out of this stable phase.
What will happen when the sun dies?
With no hydrogen left to fuse in the core, a shell of fusion hydrogen will course around the helium-filled core, astrophysicist Jillian Scudder wrote in an article for The Conversation. Gravitational forces volition take over, compressing the core and assuasive the residual of the dominicus to expand.
Our star will grow to exist larger than nosotros can imagine — so big that it volition envelope the inner planets, including World. That's when the sun will become a scarlet behemothic, which it will remain for about a billion years.
Then, the hydrogen in that outer core will deplete, leaving an abundance of helium. That element will so fuse into heavier elements, similar oxygen and carbon, in reactions that don't emit as much energy. In one case all the helium disappears, the forces of gravity volition take over, and the sun will shrink into a white dwarf. All the outer material will dissipate, leaving backside a planetary nebula.
"When a star dies, it ejects a mass of gas and dust — known as its envelope — into space. The envelope can be as much equally half the star'southward mass," astronomer Albert Zijlstra of the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. "This reveals the star's core, which by this point in the star'southward life is running out of fuel, eventually turning off and before finally dying."
Astronomers judge that the sun has about 7 billion to 8 billion years left before it sputters out and dies. One way or another, humanity may well exist long gone by then.
No supernova, no black pigsty
Our sunday isn't massive enough to trigger a stellar explosion, chosen a supernova, when it dies, and it volition never become a black hole either.
In lodge to create a supernova, a star needs virtually 10 times the mass of our dominicus. An object of that size would form a dumbo stellar corpse called a neutron star later on the explosion.
To leave behind a black hole, a supernova must occur in a star with about 20 times the mass of the sun.
Additional resources
Find out what will happen to the World when the dominicus dies, from Live Scientific discipline. Learn more about how stars form, evolve and die from NASA, and learn more about how the agency studies our dominicus. Watch a mini documentary on the topic, The Death of the Sun, from PBS Space Time.
Bibliography
- Gesicki, K., "The mysterious age invariance of the planetary nebula luminosity part brilliant cut-off," Nature Astronomy (2018). https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-018-0453-9
- NASA, "Our Lord's day — In Depth," last updated Oct. fifteen, 2021. https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/solar-system/sun/in-depth/
- NASA, "Why the Dominicus Won't Become a Blackness Pigsty," Sept. 26, 2019. https://www.nasa.gov/image-feature/goddard/2019/why-the-sun-wont-become-a-black-pigsty
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Source: https://www.space.com/14732-sun-burns-star-death.html
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