• Question: what happens when he sun blows up and when do you think that will happen roughly?

    Asked by Jodie to Connor, Jillian, Lidunka, Sarah, Steven on 17 Jun 2015. This question was also asked by james-peters pokemaster.
    • Photo: Lidunka Vocadlo

      Lidunka Vocadlo answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      @Jodie in about 5 billion years the sun will start to die. It will expand forming a red giant, and then expel a lot of gas in a planetary nebula leaving behind a contracted white dwarf star. When all the thermal energy is lost from the white dwarf, it will become a black dwarf – a dead star.

    • Photo: Steven Thomson

      Steven Thomson answered on 17 Jun 2015:

      When the Sun runs out of fuel, it’ll swell up into a Red Giant star, swallowing up some of the planets and throwing the rest out of their orbits. Eventually, it’ll eject a lot of its outer layers as dust and gas and then the Sun will shrink back down again into a White Dwarf, where it’ll cool down over time and fade away.

      Astronomers don’t think this is going to happen for at least another 5 billion years though, so there’s nothing to worry about!

    • Photo: Jillian Scudder

      Jillian Scudder answered on 23 Jun 2015:

      We don’t have to wait for the sun to blow up to have problems on earth – the sun increases in brightness by 10% about every 1 billion years; if the sun does this again in the next 1 billion years, the increase in heat to the Earth’s surface will evaporate all the water in the oceans into our skies and plunge us into a hyper-greenhouse effect.

      The actual explosion will happen a few billion years later, after the sun expands so much it’s out to where Mars orbits now- the sun will shrug off the outer layers of itself, forming a planetary nebula, and leaving behind just the white-hot core – a white dwarf!

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