When will the Sun explode? This question interests many inquisitive readers of the Internet. Don’t worry, it won’t happen soon. In addition, there will be no supposed supernova explosion, since the mass of our luminary is not enough for this.
The “death” of the Sun will come in 10-12 billion years. In the meantime, our star is in the “prime of its powers”, in a phase known as the “main sequence”. Nuclear fusion of hydrogen takes place in the bowels of the Sun, allowing it to radiate energy and provide sufficient pressure to keep the star from collapsing under the influence of its own mass.But nothing lasts forever. As a result, this stable process will fail in about 6.4 billion years.
“The sun is a little less than 5 billion years old. By the standards of the Universe, this is a middle-aged star. In the sense that its life will last about 10 billion years or so,” explains Paola Testa, an astrophysicist from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory and the Harvard College Observatory, Live Science reports.
Agony
However, before death, the Sun will go into a state of prolonged “agony” — the phase of the red giant. According to NASA, after about 6.4 billion years, our star will cease to emit heat due to nuclear fusion, and its core will become unstable and begin to shrink. Meanwhile, the outer part of the Sun, which will still contain hydrogen, will expand, turning red as a result of cooling. This expansion will gradually absorb the planets adjacent to the Sun — Mercury and Venus.
What will happen to the Earth?
Solar winds will be amplified to such an extent that they will destroy the Earth’s magnetic field and blow away its atmosphere. This will not happen immediately, but gradually — over 1-1.5 billion years. Due to the decrease in the atmosphere, the pressure will decrease and the oceans will evaporate. Then, literally a couple of tens of millions of years before the final death of the Sun, the Earth will be destroyed, and its remnants will be absorbed by our star.
Then the Sun will begin to synthesize the helium left over from the synthesis of hydrogen into carbon and oxygen. After that, only a bare core the size of the Earth with a planetary nebula around it will remain of our luminary — a scattered luminous shell of hot plasma remnants. The nebula will be visible for only about 10 thousand years — an instant on a cosmic scale. Eventually the Sun will turn into a white dwarf.
Final Death
Then there will be a very slow cooling process of the core, which will last trillions of years. After that, the white dwarf will begin to turn red, and then it will cease to glow at all in the optical spectrum and will be visible exclusively in the infrared range until any radiation stops at all — the phase of a black dwarf with a surface temperature of 5 K.
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