Red Giant - The Sun As A Red Giant

The Sun As A Red Giant

See also: Sun#Life_phases

When the Sun has exhausted the hydrogen fuel in its core in around 5 billion years, it will begin to expand and at its largest it will approximately reach the orbit of the Earth, before losing its atmosphere completely to a planetary nebula and leaving the core to become a white dwarf. The evolution of the Sun into and through the red-giant phase has been extensively modelled, but it is still unclear whether the Earth will be engulfed by the Sun or will, barely, survive. At its brightest, the red-giant Sun will be several thousand times more luminous than today despite being around half the temperature.

Read more about this topic:  Red Giant

Famous quotes containing the words sun, red and/or giant:

    “The sun was like a great visiting presence that stimulated and took its due from all animal energy. When it flung wide its cloak and stepped down over the edge of the fields at evening, it left behind it a spent and exhausted world.”
    —Willa Cather (1873–1947)

    “O My Luve’s like a red, red rose,
    That’s newly sprung in June;
    O My Luve’s like the melodie
    That’s sweetly played in tune.”
    —Robert Burns (1759–1796)

    “Long ago the country bore the country-town and nourished it with her best blood. Now the giant city sucks the country dry, insatiably and incessantly demanding and devouring fresh streams of men, till it wearies and dies in the midst of an almost uninhabited waste of country.”
    —Oswald Spengler (1880–1936)