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What Will We Do When Our Sun Dies?
Our Sun will not last forever. In fact current stellar evolution suggests our sun will go out of it's main sequence burning in as little as 100 million years.


Some astronomers predict our sun will go off it's main sequence in as little as five million years. The main stream thought on this is more like 300 to 400 million years. Seismic studies also offer a look into the distant future of the sun. In a few billion years, the sun will exhaust the hydrogen fuel in its core, triggering a sequence of events that will eventually lead to it's death as a collapsed white dwarf. Exactly when that will happen depends on the amount of mixing that occurs between the solar core and its outer layers: the more mixing, the longer the sun's life (because more hydrogen can find its way to the central nuclear fires).

Solar Flare in H-Alpha (JPEG, 38K)
This is an image of a solar flare as seen in H-Alpha. (Courtesy National Solar Observatory/Sacramento Peak)

Most folks know that in about 5-6 billion years the Sun will become a red giant star, and grow to the orbit of Venus or perhaps grow as large as Earth's orbit . What some may not know is that even now, the Sun grows brighter and brighter as it's hydrogen supply burns off in the main sequence. In another 250 million years of this steady increase, it will be about 5 percent more luminous. This means that the surface of the Earth will be much hotter. Because of the temperature change our oceans will put more water vapor into the atmosphere creating a terrestrial greenhouse effect. Some forecasts suggest that in as little as another few hundred million years, the Earth's biosphere may turn very inhospitable.
View Another Star A QuickTime VR object movie that allows the user to rotate the Fe XII 195 Å Sun 599k .mov through almost an entire rotation --- at the rate the user determines with simple mouse dragging of the "object" --- the Sun.
QuickTime VR players for Macintosh and Windows can be obtained here. Until the new QTVR plug-in becomes available, however, you won't be able to view VR movies from within your Web viewer. Until then, you'll have to download the object movie and play it on your machine.
Speculation It is interesting to note that if our mean temperature on Earth increases by ten to twenty degrees this planet would become very different, perhaps uninhabitable. I guess that's why I created these pages because I like most other folks thought we had billions of years left before we had to think about vacating or moving our planet.In my mind the difference in the timeline between three billion years and let's say 200 million years was pretty significant.

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