The Life of Our Sun

Well I must admit, it was an extremely interesting topic to me when it was covered in class and so I decided to make a blog entry about it.

Our sun. We depend on it a great deal, like our existence for example. The crappy part? Our big ball of burning Hydrogen and He has a clock on it. Keep your socks on, though, because this clock we're talking about will only go off by the time that you're long gone. To be honest, Jesus will probably have returned by then.

You might be asking, 'How in the heck did you figure out that the sun's going to stop burning and then find the time in which it's going to happen?' Well, my friend, it's called nuclear fusion. That's what keeps our sun burning and like every fire, it needs fuel to keep burning. Thanks to the world-renowned equation of E=mc² we can find out how fast the sun is using up it's Hydrogen and Helium. Once all of the nasty mathematical stuff is through (which I won't include on this blog), we come up with a number like 10 million years. Yes, there is still 10 million years until the sun turns into a Red Giant a.k.a. Earth-is-Toast Time.

10 million years is a long time to be quite frank. Long enough for our family names to go out of existence and the human race to kill itself, long enough for us to find Vulcans and Borg out in the universe and most certainly long enough for the Jesus to come back. Am I worried? Heck no, I was powdering my nose in class when he mentioned that and I didn't even blink (although I found the equations pretty nifty and was surprised by how easy it was to figure out).

What is a Red Giant? It's a massive star that's near the end of it's life and decreases in temperature and greatly increases in both size and luminosity (brightness). When our sun becomes a Red Giant it will be roughly 100X larger and 1000X brighter, which means that it could very well expand enough to engulf Mercury and maybe even Venus. I hope those astronomers are taking all of the pictures that they can, they've only got 10 million years before we might lose two planets!

There's loads of more information on Wikipedia about the sun, which includes three potential problems with our big burning center of the universe; one of which I just mentioned in minor detail. You've got 10 million years, might as well take a look.