What will happen when the Sun runs out of fuel in 5 billion years?

What will happen when the Sun runs out of fuel in 5 billion years?

Some 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40\% brighter than today. And, in about 5.4 billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel, marking the end of its main sequence phase. What will inevitably happen next is that the built-up helium in the core will become unstable and collapse under its own weight.

When the Sun runs out of hydrogen it will become a?

red giant
As such, when our Sun runs out of hydrogen fuel, it will expand to become a red giant, puff off its outer layers, and then settle down as a compact white dwarf star, then slowly cooling down for trillions of years.

Why will our Sun become a red giant star in about 5 billion years?

A: Roughly 5 billion years from now, the Sun will exhaust the hydrogen fuel in its core and start burning helium, forcing its transition into a red giant star. During this shift, its atmosphere will expand out to somewhere around 1 astronomical unit — the current average Earth-Sun distance.

What will happen when the Sun turns into a red giant?

In approximately 5 billion years, the sun will begin the helium-burning process, turning into a red giant star. When it expands, its outer layers will consume Mercury and Venus, and reach Earth. Either way, life as we know it on Earth will cease to exist.

What happens when sun runs out of fuel?

With its thermonuclear fuel gone, the sun will no longer be able to shine. The immensely high pressures and temperatures in its interior will slacken. The sun will shrink down to become a dying ember of a star, known as a white dwarf, only a little larger than Earth.

When the Sun burns out what will happen?

After the Sun exhausts the hydrogen in its core, it will balloon into a red giant, consuming Venus and Mercury. Earth will become a scorched, lifeless rock — stripped of its atmosphere, its oceans boiled off. Astronomers aren’t sure exactly how close the Sun’s outer atmosphere will come to Earth.

What will happen to Earth when the sun burns hydrogen?

In fact, for every billion years the sun spends burning hydrogen, it gets about 10\% brighter. And while 10\% might not seem a lot, that difference could be catastrophic for our planet. “The predictions for what exactly will happen to Earth as the Sun brightens over the next billion years are pretty uncertain,” Scudder said.

How long did it take the sun to fuse hydrogen into helium?

Scientists estimate that it took the Sun only 100,000 years to gather enough mass in order to begin fusing hydrogen into helium. For roughly a few million years, the Sun shone very brightly as a T Tauri star, before it eventually settled into its current G-type main-sequence configuration.

What happens to the Sun when it becomes a red giant?

“Once hydrogen has stopped burning in the core of the sun, the star has formally left the main sequence and can be considered a red giant ,” Scudder said. “It will then spend about a billion years expanding and burning helium in its core, with a shell around it where hydrogen is still able to fuse into helium.”

What will the Sun look like in 5 billion years from now?

Some 3.5 billion years from now, the Sun will be 40\% brighter than today. And, in about 5.4 billion years, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel, marking the end of its main sequence phase. What will inevitably happen next is that the built-up helium in the core will become unstable and collapse under its own weight.