Posted on 04/16/2016 3:54:28 PM PDT by MtnClimber
Stars are born, they live, and they die. The sun is no different, and when it goes, the Earth goes with it. But our planet won't go quietly into the night.
Rather, when the sun expands into a red giant during the throes of death, it will vaporize the Earth.
Perhaps not the story you were hoping for, but there's no need to startbuying star-death insurance yet. The time scale is long — 7 billion or 8 billion years from now, at least. Humans have been around only about 40-thousandth that amount of time; if the age of the Earth were compressed into a 24-hour day, humans would occupy only the last second, at most. If contemplating stellar lifetimes does nothing else, it should underscore the existential insignificance of our lives.
So what happens when the sun goes out? The answer has to do with how the sun shines. Stars begin their lives as big agglomerations of gas, mostly hydrogen with a dash of helium and other elements. Gas has mass, so if you put a lot of it in one place, it collapses in on itself under its own weight. That creates pressure on the interior of the proto-star, which heats up the gas until it gets so hot that the electrons get stripped off the atoms and the gas becomes charged, or ionized (a state called a plasma). The hydrogen atoms, each containing a single proton, fuse with other hydrogen atoms to become helium, which has two protons and two neutrons. The fusion releases energy in the form of light and heat, which creates outward pressure, and stops the gas from collapsing any further. A star is born (with apologies to Barbra Streisand).
There's enough hydrogen to keep this process going for billions of years.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
That will be global warming!
We die to. Is this article the Onion or something? Little slow in the science world appearantley.
Damn, something else to worry about!
..and I feel fine.
It is funny how the Bible got the beginning and the end pretty correct thousands of years before the first telescopes...
Hillary and Al will blame it on Global Warming....
All I know is that Women and minorities will be hit hardest.
This is pretty much the definition of something not worth worrying about.
There ya go...
[[What Will Happen to Earth When the Sun Dies?]]
We will mourn for a month or so, much weeping, much eating, much sorrow- then we will all break out our space heaters, and sit in a room and try to stay warm until another sun is born, which might take a little while- but it will be worth the wait, and hten htere will be much celebration, much eating, and much happiness
A big fire is almost certain to happen before the sun burns out, goes red. One good meteorite and the atmosphere gets hot enough to burn off the vegetation.
I wonder if my homeowners insurance covers that?
But a more immediate threat as the Sun's magnetic field continues to decline
So less Sunspots
Expect a new Ice Age around 2025 / 2030 time frame.
More here:
http://solarcycle24com.proboards.com/thread/2403/global-cooling-nears-2017-2053
and
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/08/the-climate-grain-production-relationship-quantified/
“I’ll tell you what this means, Norm - - no size restrictions and screw the limit.”
Obama needs to issue executive actions to stop this from happening before it’s too late. It’s the biggest issue for our country.
Dibs on the Whale Carcasses
(Classic larson comic two flies land on a huge whale carcass- the one that landed first says “Dibs”)
We can change the sun’s fate if we tax people enough.
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