What will happen to the sun over the next few million years?

Answer 1

When the Sun dies out it will trigger a massive explosion expanding 300 times it's usual diameter meaning it will consume Mercury,Venus and Even Earth (possibly even Mars!)

Even if you were further away the Sun would burn us if the core hadn't all died out if it had then we would all freeze to death.

Answer 2

Over the next few million years, the sun will continue to steadily increase in brightness and temperature as it exhausts its nuclear fuel. This will cause it to expand into a red giant phase, engulfing the inner planets in the solar system, including Earth. Eventually, the sun will shed its outer layers to form a planetary nebula and leave behind a small, hot core known as a white dwarf.

Answer 3

This is actually a rather long and complicated process. Stars don't BOOM, run out of fuel like a car might. Originally, all stars are composed mostly of hydrogen, the simplest atom. They "burn" by forcing these atoms together into helium atoms, which is a nuclear fusion process and not a chemical process, and creates MASSIVE amounts of energy. As time goes on (on the order of millions or BILLIONS of years), the star will begin to run out of hydrogen and will start to force helium atoms together into carbon at the same time.

But to get back to your question, as the Sun starts to run out of fuel (long story short) it becomes unstable. Eventually, when it is about 10 billion years old, our Sun will become a type of Red Giant. At this point, Earth and the other terrestrial planets will have been "gobbled up" by the expanding Sun. When the Sun becomes hot enough to start "burning" helium, it will - explosively. In a process called a helium flash, a runaway explosion of fusing helium occurs within the core of the Sun. Unfortunately, this won't look nearly as cool as it sounds - the Sun won't get any brighter. Ironically, it will get dimmer. The Sun is a rather low-mass star, and it isn't large enough to sustain helium fusion for very long at all. (Larger stars can fuse atoms much larger, and ancient fusion of this kind created all complex atoms in the universe today.) Of course, this is in a star's life, and it may be ten million years before it runs low on helium fuel as well.

After this, the Sun will become a Red Giant again. And now we come to the point where the Sun will truly start to die. Because of the composition of the inside of the Sun, and because it is too small to start "burning" carbon, it will expand and cool. Basically, the Sun will start to fall apart. The outer layers of the Sun will drift away, while the center will continue to function, very hot and very bright. And when the last of the fuel is being used up, the center will contract and heat up, eventually becoming so hot it will ionize the cloud of material (the outer parts of the old Sun that drifted off), causing a very cool-looking phenomenon called a planetary nebula. Confused about the name? Well, it's a holdover from the 18th century, when astronomers were looking through telescopes not nearly as clear or as powerful as ours, couldn't tell what it was they were looking at, and thought they may be similar to the rings around our gaseous planets. Planetary nebulae can form very differently from one another, and are quite spectacular. As a break from what I am sure is becoming a long and rather involved answer, go look some up.

The gas cloud around the still-cooling center will eventually dissipate completely. At this point, the core will contract as it cools, causing it to heat up again. It is now VERY dense - a bit as small as a grape would weigh about one ton. At this point, it becomes visible, though it is no longer fusing atoms and is only radiating leftover energy. This is called a white dwarf, and it contains about half the mass of the Sun while it is only about as big as the Earth. This will continue to cool and dim, over trillions of years, until it becomes a black dwarf, a dark chunk of matter barely above absolute zero.

Hopefully, this was not too in-depth for you, nor too technical. Considering I condensed material spread over several days from Astronomy 101.

When all is said and done, the Sun will be a cold, dark, dense burnt-out core the size of the Earth.

Answer 4

When more than about 60% of the Sun's hydrogen has been converted into helium, the Sun will start to shrink because the power required to suspend the Sun's upper layers against the force of gravity is insufficient. There is a very delicate balance of forces inside of any star. There's the force of gravity, which is trying to cause everything to collapse. There is the pressure within the star, that tries to make it expand. The pressure comes from the heat within the star.

The internal energy of the star comes from fusing hydrogen, which has one proton, into helium, which has two protons and two neutrons. The total mass of a helium nucleus is LESS than the total mass of four hydrogen nuclei, and the difference in mass is converted into energy in accordance with Einstein's famous equation, "E = MC2".

So the star "burns" hydrogen and leaves helium as the "ash" of the stellar fire. Helium itself will fuse, but it takes much higher pressure and temperatures than our Sun is now producing.

As long as hydrogen fusion is continuing with the star's core, the forces of collapse and expansion remain balanced. If the rate of fusion slows down - as it will when the amount of hydrogen reaches some critical level - then the internal pressure will fall and the star will begin to collapse. But this too is a balance; if the star begins to collapse in on itself, this collapse itself generates additional heat and pressure, which prevents the star from collapsing too quickly.

So the star, with hydrogen reserves dwindling, will slowly shrink, trading the gravitational energy of the collapse for heat energy to continue to resist the collapse. The internal temperature and pressure of the star will continue to increase until at some point the internal temperature and pressure of the star reaches the point at which the helium in the star itself begins to fuse into carbon and heavier elements.

When helium fusion begins, the new energy of helium fusion - and all that fuel! - will cause the star to expand into a red giant, consuming the inner planets; Mercury and Venus for certain, probably Earth and perhaps Mars as well. This will probably happen in about 5 billion years, more or less.

After another half-billion years or so as a red giant, much of the helium itself will have fused into carbon and heavier elements, and the Sun will once again begin to shrink. trading gravitational energy for temperature and pressure within the core.

For a star two or three times more massive than our Sun, there would be another step; the fusion of carbon into iron, and the abrupt expansion of a "nova". The core of the star would be crushed into a neutron star, or for very large stars, a "black hole in space".

But for our Sun, it will probably shrink into a white dwarf star, and over the next 20 billion years or so, shrink into a brown dwarf or black dwarf star. If nothing happens to interrupt this sequence, that is.

But in only 4 billion years, our Milky Way galaxy will probably collide with the Andromeda Galaxy. There is no way to predict what will happen THEN.

Answer 5

In the next few MILLION years? Approximately nothing. If our current understanding of nuclear physics is even approximately correct, the Sun ought to shine on, more or less as it has for the past billion years, for the NEXT billion years.

Which isn't to say that there will be no changes at all! The Earth is only habitable because the Sun is mostly stable, but as we have seen over the last few million years, the Sun does have some TINY instabilities, which appear to cause ice ages. (We may be heading into one now!) The Sun's 11-year "sunspot cycle" is itself only an approximation, and we've seen two examples in the last 500 years when sunspots mostly disappeared for many decades, accompanied by distinctly unpleasantly cold weather. Read up on the "Maunder Minimum" if you want to learn more.

Answer 6

The earth will be the same just winters and summers will get warmer..... never mind that.I guess basically the earth will boil like an egg in a pot of water..... but we won't have to worry about that for another 30 million years.

Answer 7

The sun will burn up and turn into a red giant (star). After at least 4 million years after that it will fade into a white dwarf (star) being the size of the Earth but still with its old mass.

-Mihi

Answer 8

Many scientists think the future red giant will not become large enough to reach the Earth and "swallow" it, but they are not 100% sure. This is because as the Sun looses mass, the Earth will slowly move outwards.

But it will expand enough to come close to the current orbit of the Earth.

They are 100% that the sun would vaporize the exterior of the Earth, or the entire planet itself.

Answer 9

What I think will happen is, in millions and millions of years, the Sun will go Supernova, swallowing Mercury, then Venus then Earth.

Don't threat though, this has such a small chance of happening.

Answer 10

i dont think anything will really happen to the sun.