According to George Harrison, the sun is one of the things that must pass.
The sun is expected to burn out.
The sun's "life" in its current phase, known as its "main sequence", is in which the nuclear fusion of hydrogen allows it to radiate energy and provide enough pressure to keep it alive.
The sun is less than 5 billion years old, according to an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. It's a kind of middle-age star, in the sense that it's going to live for about 10 billion years.
The planets in the solar system are on the same plane.
After the sun has burned through most of the hydrogen in its core, it will transition to its next phase as a red giant. The sun will stop generating heat in 5 billion years, and its core will become unstable, according to NASA. The outer part of the sun, which will still contain hydrogen, will glow red as it cools. The expansion will cause the sun's solar winds to cause Earth's magnetic field to be wiped out.
It will be bad news for life on our planet if any has survived the 10% increase in the sun's brightness that is expected to destroy Earth's oceans in 1 billion to 1.5 billion years. A 2008 study published in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society states that the sun will consume the rocky remains of the Earth within a few million years.
The sun will collapse down to its core as it begins to fusion the helium left over from hydrogen fusion into carbon and oxygen, leaving behind a beautiful planetary nebula in its outer layers. Testa said that the nebula will be visible for a blink of an eye. The sun will spend trillions of years cooling off before becoming a non-emitting object.
Scientists needed to know how the sun emits energy to arrive at a timetable for the sun and all stars.
Nuclear reactions and fusion are an important part of understanding how a star works, which is why a lot of the science is relatively new. One of the main ideas of how stars worked before the 1930s was that energy was coming from the stars' own gravity.
Astronomers and astrophysicists were able to come up with more complete models after they had a better understanding of fusion.
Testa told Live Science that astronomy and astrophysicists could build a model for how stars evolve by putting together lots of different information from lots of different stars. This gives us a good idea of how old the sun is.
The oldest known meteorites, which formed from the same solar nebula, a swirling disk of gas and dust, gave rise to the sun and planetary bodies in the solar system.
Scientists have a good idea of when the sun's light will fade.
Live Science published the original article.
