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The hydrogen fuel at the core will finally be exhausted in five billion years, when the Sun will be 67% more luminous than at present. Thereafter, the Sun will continue to burn hydrogen in a shell surrounding its core until the luminosity reaches 121% above the present value.
The Sun is a burning plasma that has reached fusion ignition, meaning the Sun's plasma temperature is maintained solely by energy released from fusion. The Sun has been burning hydrogen for 4.5 billion years and is about halfway through its life cycle. [1]
Fusing four free protons (hydrogen nuclei) into a single alpha particle (helium nucleus) releases around 0.7% of the fused mass as energy, [68] so the Sun releases energy at the mass–energy conversion rate of 4.26 billion kg/s (which requires 600 billion kg of hydrogen [69]), for 384.6 yottawatts (3.846 × 10 26 W), [5] or 9.192 × 10 10 ...
The Sun's luminosity will have increased by 35–40%, causing all water currently present in lakes and oceans to evaporate, if it had not done so earlier. The greenhouse effect caused by the massive, water-rich atmosphere will result in Earth's surface temperature rising to 1,400 K (1,130 °C; 2,060 °F), which is hot enough to melt some ...
The expanding Sun is expected to vaporize Mercury as well as Venus, and render Earth and Mars uninhabitable (possibly destroying Earth as well). [31] [32] Eventually, the core will be hot enough for helium fusion; the Sun will burn helium for a fraction of the time it burned hydrogen in the core. The Sun is not massive enough to commence the ...
The Sun is a main-sequence star, and, as such, generates its energy by nuclear fusion of hydrogen nuclei into helium. In its core, the Sun fuses 620 million metric tons of hydrogen and makes 616 million metric tons of helium each second. The fusion of lighter elements in stars releases energy and the mass that always accompanies it.
Due to fusion, the composition of the solar plasma drops from about 70% hydrogen by mass at the outer core, to 34% hydrogen at the center. [4] The core contains 34% of the Sun's mass, but only 3% of the Sun's volume, and it generates 99% of the fusion power of the Sun.
An illustration comparing the structure of the Sun (left) and its possible future as a red giant (right; not to scale). The inset at the bottom right shows a size comparison. A red giant is a star that has exhausted the supply of hydrogen in its core and has begun thermonuclear fusion of hydrogen in a shell