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Asked by kaylee222 to Alan, Deepak, Francesca, Lilly, Nick on 7 Mar 2014.
Question: how would you find out when the sun will burst?
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Deepak Kar answered on 7 Mar 2014:
Very good question!
I am not an expert on the area, but here is how would I attack the problem. I would try to find out my from astronomer friends about what makes stars burst, presumably when they run out gas to burn. Once I know that, I will try to find out how long it took those stars to reach that stage. Then I will use those data, and try to create a formula which will calculate stars lifetime as a function of its size and brightness (for example, it will probably be more complicated). Then I will plug in those numbers for the sun to get sun’s remaining lifetime.
But from whatever I know, it is far away. Far far away.
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Alan Fitzsimmons answered on 7 Mar 2014:
Hi, I’m not sure what you mean by the sun bursting, but I think I can guess.
Every few days there’s a big explosion on the surface of the Sun. We call these Solar flares. Although we can predict where on the Sun these might happen, we still don’t know when they will happen. That’s a shame because when they do we sometimes can see the Northern Lights in the sky.
We know when the Sun will die by studying the Sun and stars like it. It will swell up to become a star called a “red giant”, and then puff out its outer laying before fading away. This can’t happen for another 500 thousand million years, so we’re not that worried about it.
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Francesca Day answered on 9 Mar 2014:
The short answer is we don’t know exactly when the sun will die! We can use science to have a pretty good guess though. The sun is a star just like the other stars you see in the sky, just much, much closer to us. By studying the stars, we can work out what the life of star looks like and how long they usually live. Then we can use our knowledge of stars to work out where the sun is in its own life. There’s no need to worry though, the sun isn’t going to die for many millions of years!
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Nick Wright answered on 11 Mar 2014:
Do you mean when will our Sun die? One of the ways we can do this is to work out how much fuel the sun has left to burn and work out how fast the sun is burning its fuel and that tells us how long it has left to live. There are quite simple ways to do both of those things and we think the answer is that the sun has about 4 or 5 billion years left to live. Is that the answer to your question?
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