Astronomer explains the fate of the planet when the sun runs out of fuel



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The sun will go through a destructive process, and it will emerge on the other side as a much smaller white dwarf, however, the middle phase, the so-called red giant, will be a real cause for concern regardless of life on Earth. . billions of years from now.

The sun provides us with heat and heat, not because it is a scorching ball of gas, but because it undergoes a continuous cycle of nuclear fusion, according to (Russia Today).

In the heart of the sun, the hydrogen atoms merge into the larger element helium, which releases huge amounts of energy, and this process is very powerful, and scientists on Earth are trying to harness it in an attempt to provide us with clean and renewable products. energy.

But the amount of hydrogen the sun can incorporate is limited, and when the star is twice the age of what it is now, it will burn all of its fuel, and the imbalance of forces acting within and outside the star will cause it to inflate like a balloon in size.

To put this in perspective, a single astronomical unit, or AU, is approximately 93 million miles.

Dr Mark Morris, professor of astronomy at the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA), said: “All projections indicate that in five billion years our sun will turn into a red giant, then, at as it gets bigger and bigger, it will eventually become what is called. “The converging giant sub-star – a star with a radius slightly less than the distance between the Sun and the Earth – is an astronomical unit in size.

Once the sun has no more hydrogen to merge into the nucleus, the nucleus will collapse on itself, but the nuclear reaction will continue in the outer layers of the sun, which will still retain gas reserves, and the core will heat up and expand the outer layers outward until Mercury and Venus are consumed and stop just before Earth.

In the process, an average star like our Sun will produce a dead white dwarf but still an incredibly hot star core, in which the outer layers that have spread through the solar system will, over time, become a planetary nebula. – an almost spherical nebula. cloud of ionizing gases.

“A star of this size is also wonderful because it is cold – a warm red against a warm blue or a warm yellow like our sun,” Morris said. “And because the atmosphere is cold, a giant red star in its surface layers can retain all of its elements in the gas phase, so some of the heavier elements – minerals and silicates – they condense as small grains dust, and when these elements condense into solid materials, the radiant pressure of this extremely luminous red giant the star repels dust grains.

The dust would take gas with it, pushing the sun’s atmosphere out with it, at which point the sun’s core, the white dwarf, would be exposed.



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