What will happen to your solar system when your sun dies?

Answer 1

There are two different ways in which a star can die,

Firstly, small stars, they cool and become white dwarfs. Nothing spectacular.

Secondly, large stars. This is more interesting. If a star is big enough and it forms a red giant, then there are two ways it can die. Firstly, the outer layer cools and dissipates away, leaving the core. This is called a neutron star and it is extremely dense, so much so that a piece the size of a marble would weigh 1 billion tonnes.

Secondly, if the red giant is big enough, then it explodes, this is called a supernova, leaving a dust cloud where it was, this cloud is called a nebula which then goes on to form new stars and planets. Alternatively, if the star is big enough, after the supernova, there will be a black hole left in its place. What a black hole is, well, that's another question for you to ask :-)

Answer 2

When the sun dies, it will expand into a red giant, engulfing the inner planets including Earth. Eventually, it will shed its outer layers to form a planetary nebula, leaving behind a small, dense core called a white dwarf. The rest of the solar system will be dramatically affected by the sun's evolution but will continue to orbit the white dwarf remnant.

Answer 3

More than the size, it is the star's mass that matters. Depending on the remaining mass after the star uses up its fuel, the star will become a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. The remaining mass may be much less than the original mass of the star: in the case of a supernova explosion, much of the original mass is blown away into space.

Answer 4

A star has to be a minimum of 9 times more massive than our Sun to go Nova. What happens inside the star is little complex. Initially the star fuses Hydrogen into Helium exerting and outward force that is kept balance by gravity, this is called the Hydrostatic Equilibrium. When the Star runs out of Hydrogen to fuse the outward force stops and the core begins to collapse. Eventually enough inward force is generated to start the fusion of Helium into beryllium and carbon, creating a cooler fused hydrogen outer layer and a hotter Helium core. This process is repeated over and over until the star has a core of iron. To fuse iron into heavier elements requires more energy than is generated so the star collapses one final time and dies in a massive outburst of energy, throwing all the outer layers away in what we see as a supernova. At this point some of the heavier elements are produced as well like gold etc. The star then can follow 1 of 2 fates, if it has less than 9 masses of the sun but more than 3 or 4 it will collapses into a neutrino star. If it still has more than 9 masses of our Sun, then it will collapse in on its self creating a gravity well we call a Black Hole.

Answer 5

it goes super nova, or in extreme cases, hyper nova; the biggest star that we know of Vy Canis Majoris will hyper nova. when the light from the explosion reaches earth, we'l be able to see the flash in the middle of the day.

The reason large stars go supernova is because of their immense mass. One day they will be so heavy that gravity will not be able to keep it together anymore, so the star collapses into itself, or implodes. The implosion will be violent enough to release enormous amounts of energy in the form of a supernova.

After that, depending on the mass of the star, the core will collapse and become a neutron star or a black hole. Only the most massive stars become black holes.

Extra fact: the Sun will not be large enough to go supernova, it's a relatively small star.

Answer 6

From: http://wind.caspercollege.edu/~marquard/astronomy/sunlike.htm

While a main sequence star, energy production by nuclear fusion in the core causes a transformation from hydrogen nuclei to helium nuclei. At some point in time the hydrogen nuclei in the core will run out. When this occurs there will no longer be a balance between gravitational pressure inward and photon pressure outward. This is due to the fact that the photon production ceases when the fusion process runs out of fuel. At this point the core (almost pure helium) will begin to collapse again. As the core collapses its temperature will rise. Surrounding the core is a shell of hydrogen. This hydrogen shell will increase in temperature due to its proximity to the core. At some point the hydrogen shell will reach the temperature to burn hydrogen. When this happens the radiation pressure outward will be greater than the gravitational pressure inward and the star will expand. (Recall that gravitational forces will decrease with distance from the center.) As the outer layers of the star expand the temperature of the gas cools causing it to turn red in color. In addition, the increase in radius will cause an increasing luminosity. The star is now considered to be a red giant.

Meanwhile, the helium core is continuing to compress and get hot. At some point it will reach 100 million Kelvin and helium will begin to fuse. This fusion converts helium nuclei into carbon and oxygen nuclei. And once again photons generate radiation pressure outward balancing the inward pressure of gravity. In the case of a star like the sun, helium burning will not occur until the core has collapsed to a point called degeneracy. Degeneracy occurs when electrons, generally ignored up to this point, are pushed too close to each other. When this happens the gas is more metallic in nature than gaseous. The effect is that energy generated by helium fusion increases the temperature of the core but the core has no mechanism to release that energy as a gas would. Therefore, the core continues to increase in temperature until it explodes in what is called a helium flash. This flash does not destroy the core but forces it to re-contract until stable helium burning can take place.

As was the case with hydrogen burning, the fuel for helium burning will eventually run out in the core. Once again the core, now carbon and oxygen, will collapse in an attempt to increase its temperature to the point of carbon burning. However, in a star like the sun that core temperature will never be attained. The collapse will cause the temperature of a helium shell surrounding the core to increase to the point of helium burning. When shell helium burning commences the outward pressure from radiation exceeds the inward pressure from gravity and the outer star expands once again toward the red giant stage of the HR diagram. In the case of a star like the sun this expansion will continue until the outer portions of the star float away from the central portion. This outer portion is referred to as a planetary nebula and it leaves behind the core which is referred to as a white dwarf.

Answer 7

Dude, are you serious? The sun is the ultimate source of heat, so when it dies, IF it doesn't incinerate the planets with a huge explosion...the temperatures on the planets would plunge into the negatives. Without heat, nothing can survive.

Answer 8

scientists think the sun will collapse on itself but before it does, it will expand in size and become a red giant and may swallow up Mercury and Venus and earth may become the first planet in our solar system. there is a chance of the suns magnetic field to reduce which means that the planets could be displaced or they may get a bigger orbit. dwarf planets and most of the contents of the kuiper belt may be lost, life may originate again on a different planet besides we will all die. we will all be roasted.the earth may not really "die" or perish. the water could dry up or evaporate in to space or it could caught in the moon or it would sucked up into the sun and the earth as we know it now could "die". But if the sun burned us up then yes the earth would be dead along with all of mankind.

Answer 9

The Sun is the primary producer of heat energy in our solar system, therefore without a Sun planets would begin to freeze and sustainable life as we now perceive it would be over, due to these conditions.

Think about how if a supervolcano exploded it would cause an ash cloud large enough to block sunlight out of our atmosphere and freeze the planet slowly. It'd be much like that but on a perpetually larger scale.

However, that will be billions of years in the future.

Also, astronomers predict that before all that, the Sun will in fact get bigger and engulf some of the inner planets. At that stage it will be a "red giant" star.

Then it will shrink to a hot "white dwarf" star.

So it will be a long long time before the planets freeze. They will get a lot hotter first.

Answer 10

A neutron star is already dead, in the sense that it no longer produces energy through fusion. It can only get colder and colder, as it radiates its residual energy out into space. If enough mass falls onto the neutron star, it may also convert to a black hole.