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Asked by anon-182512 on 25 Jun 2018.
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Liza Selley answered on 25 Jun 2018:
Thankfully the sun is unlikely to pop. It is a star though and all stars eventually run out of hydrogen which is the burning gas that fuels them. When this happens, the sun will expand massively to become a ‘red giant’ which would be big enough to swallow up the closest planets -Mercury and Venus. After this, the red giant would collapse to form a tiny ‘white dwarf’ which will cool down until it is no longer visible.
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Claire Donald answered on 28 Jun 2018:
I read an article about this in ‘The Conversation’ about the future of the Sun. It agrees with Liza that although some stars do explode, our Sun is too small. Instead, in about 6 billion years, it will become a ‘Red Giant’ star. This means that it will swell up (possibly engulfing the Earth!) before cooling down to a shiny red colour. This will last for a few million years before it eventually dies. When this happens the outer layers will come off and the core will gradually cool and go dark. Poor Sun 🙁
You can read the article here https://theconversation.com/curious-kids-whats-going-to-happen-to-the-sun-in-the-future-will-it-explode-78029
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Lauren Burns answered on 29 Jun 2018:
While our sun isn’t big enough to pop, when it dies it will expand as it cools to the point where it will consume all of the inner planets (including Earth). But, it doesn’t have enough power inside to ‘pop’ itself. Really large stars sometimes do expand to the point where they can no longer be contained by their own gravity so explode, which is how we get super-novae and nebulae – which are some of the most beautiful stellar phenomena there are.
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