The Sun will expand into a red giant

9 months ago
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the Sun will expand into a red giant star.
In a few billion years, the sun will become a red giant so large that it will engulf our planet. But the Earth will become uninhabitable much sooner than that. After about a billion years the sun will become hot enough to boil our oceans.

The sun is currently classified as a "main sequence" star. This means that it is in the most stable part of its life, converting the hydrogen present in its core into helium. For a star the size of ours, this phase lasts a little over 8 billion years. Our solar system is just over 4.5 billion years old, so the sun is slightly more than halfway through its stable lifetime.

After 8 billion years of happily burning hydrogen into helium are over, the sun's life gets a little more interesting. Things change because the sun will have run out of hydrogen in its core – all that's left is the helium. The trouble is that the sun's core is not hot or dense enough to burn helium.

The process of compression in the centre allows the outer regions of the star to expand outwards. The burning hydrogen in the shell around the core significantly increases the brightness of the sun. Because the size of the star has expanded, the surface cools down and goes from white-hot to red-hot. Because the star is brighter, redder and physically larger than before, we dub these stars "red giants".

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