When our sun dies what will it become

As we saw above, at first the moons of the outer worlds will melt, losing their icy shells and potentially hosting liquid water oceans on their surfaces. Eventually, the Kuiper belt objects , including Pluto and its mysterious friends, will also lose their ices.

The largest may transform into mini-Earths orbiting a distant, distorted red sun. But eventually, our sun will give up the struggle, shrugging off its outer atmosphere in a series of outbursts that leave behind the star's core: a white-hot lump of carbon and oxygen. This white dwarf will initially be staggeringly hot, blasting off X-ray radiation that can do brutal damage to life as we know it.

But within a billion years or so, the white dwarf will settle down to more manageable temperatures and simply hang out for trillions upon trillions of years. That dim white dwarf will host a new habitable zone, but because the former sun will be so cool, that zone would be incredibly close, much closer than Mercury orbits our sun today. At that distance, any planet or planetary core would be vulnerable to tidal disruption — a pretty way of saying the gravity of the white dwarf could inadvertently rip a planet to shreds.

Learn more by listening to the episode "Can planets survive the death of their star? Thanks to Guy R. Paul M.

An international team of astronomers observed the phenomenon, which forms when a star runs out of nuclear fuel to burn, and dies. The distant planet, a gas giant with a mass 1. The scientists say the discovery is in keeping with previous calculations that more than half of white dwarf stars may have similar giant planets orbiting them. Though the phenomenon had been predicted, it had never been observed before. Blackman said the discovery shed light on what will happen when the sun runs out of fuel.

In five billion years, the sun is expected to expand, becoming what is known as a red giant. Earth may survive the event, but will not be habitable. Queen guitarist Brian May and David Eicher launch new astronomy book. Last chance to join our Costa Rica Star Party! Learn about the Moon in a great new book New book chronicles the space program. Dave's Universe Year of Pluto. Groups Why Join?

Astronomy Day. The Complete Star Atlas. Sirius is a binary star system, home to Sirius A left , a main sequence star, and Sirius B right , a white dwarf. Eventually, Sirius B will cool enough that it no longer gives off visible light, becoming a black dwarf.

The same fate awaits the Sun trillions of years in the future. Andrew Nemec. What colors are the planets in our solar system? And why are they so different? The sun gives energy to life on Earth, and without this star, we wouldn't be here. But like most things in space, even stars have limited lifetimes, and someday our sun will die.

You don't need to worry about this solar death anytime soon, though. Inside the sun , a churning fusion engine fuels the star, and it still has a lot of fuel left — about 5 billion years' worth.

Stars like our sun form when a huge cloud of gas mostly hydrogen and helium grows so large that it collapses under its own weight. The pressure is so high in the center of that collapsing mass of gas that the heat reaches unimaginable levels, with temperatures so hot that hydrogen atoms lose their electrons.