[Kowboy]

What will happen to the sun?

I believe, so far it is in the main seqence star part. It will become a red giant, then white dwarf eventually. How? Well now the sun is I believe using Hydrogen and Helium atoms being fused together. In the future it will use Helium-Hydrogen and be mixed with Carbon to make it Hydrogen-Helium-Carbon. Then it will mix with other various elements. When it is all fused together its atoms will be 4x bigger. When this happens it will extend out past Mars. After that, it will just start becoming a nebular cloud. All of the atoms will have spaces between them. The gravity will compact all of it together until they are as compacted as possible. Althought it would be much smaller (earth or smaller) it will still weigh the same.
Put it this way:

You bring a 2,000 pound truck to the junkyard. The compacter makes it so that it is 1m by 1 meter. Although it was made smaller, it still weighs the same, thats what will, in a way, happen to the red giant/nebular cloud.

----

Fact: The Sun will not become a black hole because it is not massive enough. Only super massive stars will. (I believe only 4 - 14% of all stars are super massive.)

--------

Edit- If the sun were indexed at 1, the smallest stars would be about less than .5, the largest would be about 3.

[Crescens]

Meh, this kinda reminds me of the first few lines of a TMBG song ... They Might Be Giants is a completely insane rock band that sings songs about completely random things. One of their songs is about the sun, and starts off:

The sun is a mass of incondescent gas
a gigantic nuclear furnace
where hydrogen is built into helium
at a temperature of millions of degrees

If you can find the song, or a few others by the band, I'd strongly recommend them. The band itself is crazy, but it can actually teach you stuff.

Or maybe I should just shut up.

[rabk]

The sun is hot
The sun is not
A place where you can live
But here on Earth
there'd be no life
without the light it gives...



*Wanders off into TMBG land...*

This post has been edited by rabk: 17 December 2003 - 12:07 AM

[Crescens]

Yay for a fellow TMBG fan...I'm going to a concert of theirs on the 30th, so nyeh. I'll cheer 'em on for ya. ^_^

[Kowboy]

Mabye Cspace put subliminal messages to get you to study...

[Crescens]

We need its heat
We need its light
the sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own sun's
atomic energy

The song has a whole load of random facts in it...

[Nuu™™]

Do you just get this out of text books? Our science is so lame, we are doing such boring stuff, like substances and what they are made of blah-de-blah-blah. I already know all of it from reading magazines...so much for school.