• Question: When will the sun explode

    Asked by somerandomguy767 to Arlene, Colin, David, Eugene, Paul on 14 Nov 2012.
    • Photo: David McKeown

      David McKeown answered on 14 Nov 2012:


      You got about 5 billion years. You weren’t planning anything were you?

      Well it won’t really explode (some stars do) it is just not big enough. It will turn into a “red giant” and get bigger before collapsing and turning into a “white dwarf”.

    • Photo: Paul Higgins

      Paul Higgins answered on 15 Nov 2012:


      Our Sun is a type of star that is stable for about 10 billion years, and ours has been around for about 4.5 billion. in a couple billion years it will start to grow because it will run out of energy in the core. Earth will become uninhabitable, unfortunately. Then the Sun will sort of collapse rapidly, but as it collapses inward, it will start to heat up (like a piston in a car engine, pumping downward)- when this happens, fusion in the core will turn back on, but it will happen so fast it pull push the sun outward, and most of the Sun’s gas will be flung into space- leaving only the core, which has been compacted into a white dwarf, like David says.

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