The Sun may seem like it’s always around, but scientists have been warning us for decades that one day we could all be destroyed by it. It seems like an exaggeration, but it’s unfortunately true. Eventually, the Sun will slowly expand and burn up Earth, along with the rest of the solar system. The good news is, this won’t happen any time soon – NASA estimates that we have at least another five billion years before Earth gets too hot and the planet becomes uninhabitable by humans.
Our sun is about 4.6 billion years old
The sun has been shining brilliantly for about 4.6 billion years, but it won’t be around forever. It will eventually expand to the point where the Earth becomes a scorching ball of fire. This process, called helioclimate, has been studied extensively by NASA scientists and was recently introduced in an episode of Stargate Universe. They predict that this event horizon will happen when the sun reaches its current age: 7.5 billion years old. However, they don’t know how much more than 7.5 billion years it could live for–potentially up to 10 trillion years! But what if it were true? What if there were nothing we could do?
All stars will die when they run out of hydrogen
All stars eventually die. The sun will die in about 7 billion years, when it runs out of hydrogen fuel. When the sun dies, it will expand into a red giant until it swallows Mercury and Venus, then Mars, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn. The earth won’t be able to survive this change because the sun will be too big to support life on its surface. Even if humans find another planet that can sustain life, there is no way we can get there in time. But don’t worry; the sun isn’t going anywhere for billions of years so you still have some time to live your best life!
In 7 billion years from now, our sun will be twice as big as it is today
In 5 billion years, the sun will start to heat up. This will cause the oceans to evaporate until there are none left. The atmosphere will disappear, leaving us with a thick, heavy layer of gas around our planet. Life on Earth will become impossible. In 7 billion years from now, our sun will be twice as big as it is today and we won’t have any way to survive this destruction. The only possible solution would be to find another planet in a different solar system that can support life. However, even if we found such a planet, the odds that humans would know how to find it are very slim. It would take at least 25 million years for humans to evolve and reach an advanced stage where they could travel outside of their solar system and another 25 million years for them to find our new solar system- or so says famed physicist Stephen Hawking
And in another 5 billion years, it’ll double again
It takes 10 billion years for the sun to change its size by 1 percent, but in about 5 billion years it will double again. The Earth’s orbit around the sun isn’t a perfect circle, which means that sometimes we get closer to the sun (perihelion) and sometimes we get farther away from the sun (aphelion). When we are at our furthest point from the sun, like now, it only receives 97% of what it would if it were nearer to us. But when the Earth reaches perihelion, the sun will be so close to us that we’ll receive 108% of what it normally gets, which means more sunlight. At first this may not seem like a huge deal because an extra 3% of light doesn’t sound too terrible – but let me tell you, having an extra 3% more heat can make all the difference between life and death!
Eventually, this process stops when the sun goes into a white dwarf phase
Scientists predict that the sun will enter the final phase of its life around 7.5 billion years from now. At this point, the sun will have entered the red giant phase and become a red giant star with a diameter of at least 200 times its current size. The outer layers will be so cool that they will no longer emit enough radiation to heat up the inner regions, which will then cause them to collapse in on themselves.
But by then all life on Earth would have died from heat stroke
If you’re like me, then you might have been wondering what the heck a solar flare was just after reading that headline. Well, it turns out that when large amounts of energy are released by the sun, they can damage our atmosphere and cause solar flares. They may not sound so bad at first glance, but when these flares occur they release a lot of electromagnetic radiation into the atmosphere which can be dangerous to life on earth. The electromagnetic waves can trigger a light show in the sky called aurora borealis, but it also interacts with water molecules in the upper atmosphere to produce some dangerous hydroxyl (OH) radicals. The OH radicals are unstable and react with air pollutants such as nitrogen oxides from car exhausts or nitric acid from power stations (also known as smog). The result is ground level ozone which causes respiratory problems for people who live near high levels of pollution.
