• Question: As the sun is constantly burning, is it becoming smaller?

    Asked by F'Sariah to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 16 Jun 2015.
    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 16 Jun 2015:

      The Sun does lose some mass through the solar wind (a constant stream of particles emitted from it) and it often ejects material in huge explosions known as ‘coronal mass ejections’, but it’s so big that these losses are really tiny in comparison.

      So it is becoming smaller, but so slowly that it will never shrink noticeably. It won’t really change in size until the end of its lifetime when it runs out of fuel in its core, and then it could actually expand into a red giant star.

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