Question: The end of a star's life depends on its birth mass. Are you currently doing this or not? If you are, would you see if it enlarged to become a red giant near the end, so you would therefore know that it had a mass with less than 5 solar masses? What other information could you gather? If a star has a mass bigger than 5 solar masses, then it ends more violently. Is this what the sun is going to do? Do you try to work out if there is any possible way of either slowing down its death or protecting Earth from the supernova explosion? Sorry that I asked so many questions, I hoped I might have given you a few new ideas!

Nick Wright answered on 13 Mar 2014:

Yes, this is one of things that I study. Some stars become red giants towards the end of lives (we think the Sun will do this at the end of its life), but even bigger stars (those that are more than 5 times more massive than our Sun) will become red supergiants, which are even bigger stars! Our Sun won’t do this because it isn’t big enough, but we can watch other stars doing it.

I don’t think there is any way to slow down the death of our Sun, but luckily for us we have a long time to think about it, because the Sun should live for another 5 billion years at least! The best thing to do when that happens is to leave our solar system and travel to another planet orbiting another star. In fact many scientists are looking for other planets right now to try to find other habitable places. Maybe some day in the future we’ll be able to visit those planets. There are so many other planets out there I’m sure we can find somewhere safe to live!