Sun will flare into ‘massive planetary nebula’ when it dies. Don’t worry we’ve still got 5 billion years
In 5 billion years our dying sun will transform into a stunning planetary nebula visible for millions of light years around, scientists say
Enjoy the sun while it lasts: in 5 billion years time, our host star will burn out, rip itself apart and turn into a massive glowing ring of interstellar gas and dust, scientists say.
Astronomers have long known that the sun will die when it runs out of fuel, but the precise nature of its death throes has been far from clear, even to the most morbid of the field’s practitioners.
Now an international team of scientists have worked out the details.
Using a new computer model, they found that rather than simply fading away as previously thought, the dying sun will transform into a stunning planetary nebula visible for millions of light years around.
“These planetary nebulae are the prettiest objects in the sky and even though the sun will only become a faint one, it will be visible from neighbouring galaxies,” said Albert Zijlstra, professor of astrophysics at the University of Manchester.
“If you lived in the Andromeda galaxy 2 million light years away you’d still be able to see it.”
The sun is in many ways an average star. It is middling in size and, at 5 billion years old, halfway through its lifetime.
The end will come when the sun’s core runs out of hydrogen, causing its centre to collapse. When this happens, nuclear reactions will start up outside the core, causing the sun to swell into a red giant that eventually engulfs Mercury and Venus.