When will the sun explode?

chrisbuttonDecember 19, 2021

According to Beatles singer-songwriter George Harrison, everything needs to pass, and according to decades of mathematical and astronomical models, these include the sun.

So when is the sun expected to burn out?

The final death of our medium-sized solar mass is trillions of years away, but the “life” of the Sun at this stage is known as the “main sequence star.” hydrogen It allows it to radiate energy and provide enough pressure to keep the stars away. Collapse under its own mass — It will be about 5 billion years from now.

“The sun is a little less than 5 billion years old,” said Paola Testa, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, a collaborative effort between the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and Harvard College Observatory. “It’s a kind of middle-aged star, in the sense that it has a lifespan of 10 billion years or so.”

After the Sun burns most of its core hydrogen, it moves on to the next stage as a red giant. At this point, about 5 billion years later, the Sun ceases to generate heat from fusion, and its core becomes unstable and contracts. According to NASA.. On the other hand, the outer part of the sun, which still contains hydrogen, Enlarge, It glows red when it gets cold. This expansion gradually swallows the sun’s neighboring planets, Mercury and Venus, and ratchets them until the sun’s solar wind is crushed. Of earth Removes the magnetic field and its atmosphere.

Of course, this will almost certainly be Bad news Assuming that whatever life remains on Earth by that time, it has survived a 10% increase in the brightness of the Sun, which is expected to evaporate the Earth’s oceans between 1 and 1.5 billion years. Geophysics Research Letter..Within millions of years after this initial expansion, the Sun is likely to consume the remains of Earth’s rocks as well, according to a study published in 2008. Monthly Notification of the Royal Astronomical Society..

Then the sun begins to fuse helium Remaining from hydrogen fusion carbon When air, Before finally collapsing into its core Gorgeous planetary nebula — A glowing shell of hot, residual plasma in its outer layer as it contracts into an incredibly dense, extremely hot, Earth-sized star corpse known as a white dwarf. The nebula will only be visible for about 10,000 years, Testa said — a blink of time in space. From there, the rest of the Sun cools over trillions of years, eventually becoming non-radiative objects.

To reach this timeline for both the Sun and all stars of its relative mass, scientists needed to know how it releases energy.

“As in the last century, many sciences are relatively new, because an integral part of understanding how a star works is with nuclear reactions. fusionSaid a tester studying the heating mechanism and process of X-ray Emission of solar flares, etc. in the outer layers of the solar atmosphere. “Before the 1930s, one of the main ideas about how stars work was that energy comes only from gravitational energy.”

A better understanding of fusion by astronomers and astrophysicists could come up with a more complete model of star life, combined with emission data observed from several stars.

“By putting together many different pieces of information from many different stars, astronomers and astrophysicists were able to build a model of how stars evolve,” the tester told Live Science. Told. “This gives us a fairly accurate estimate of the age of the sun.”

This age (about 4.6 to 4.7 billion years) is also supported by radiometric dating. The oldest known meteoriteFormed from the same solar nebula, a swirling disk of gas and dust, gave rise to the Sun and planetary bodies in the solar system.

Thanks to these tools, scientists have a good understanding of when the sun’s rays burn out and disappear.