Lifecycle of The Sun
Lifecycle of the Sun
Do you know how the sun began and when will it end?
The Solar System was formed around 4.6 billion years ago from a large cloud of dust and gas, called a nebula. This collapsed under its own gravity, transferring gravitational potential energy to kinetic energy in its particles. As the nebula collapsed it became denser, and rotated more rapidly. Collisions between particles caused kinetic energy to be transferred as internal energy and thermal energy. The core of the nebula began to form a hot, dense protostar.
When the Sun’s core became hot enough and dense enough, nuclear fusion reactions began, giving out energy and radiation.
A star like the Sun is at equilibrium - gravity tends to pull it inwards, and radiation pressure from the nuclear reactions tends to expand it outwards. In other words, the gravitational collapse is balanced by the expansion due to fusion energy.
The Sun is currently a main sequence star and will remain so for another 4-5 billion years. It will then expand and cool to become a red giant, after which it will shrink and heat up again to become a white dwarf. The white dwarf star will run out of nuclear fuel and slowly cool down over many billions of years.
Thank you everyone for reading this post!
Informative post, but will the Sun ever turn into a black hole?🤔
ReplyDeleteNo, the Sun will never turn into a black hole as it is too small for that. It would need to be about 20 times more massive to end its life as a black hole.
Delete