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In the long term, the greatest changes in the Solar System will come from changes in the Sun itself as it ages. As the Sun burns through its hydrogen fuel supply, it gets hotter and burns the remaining fuel even faster. As a result, the Sun is growing brighter at a rate of ten percent every 1.1 billion years. [117]
He reasoned that it was a giant flaming ball of metal even larger than the land of the Peloponnesus and that the Moon reflected the light of the Sun. [176] Eratosthenes estimated the distance between Earth and the Sun in the third century BC as "of stadia myriads 400 and 80000", the translation of which is ambiguous, implying either 4,080,000 ...
When the mass of hydrogen becomes sufficiently large, runaway fusion causes a nova. In a few binary systems where the hydrogen fuses on the surface, the mass of helium built up can burn in an unstable helium flash. In certain binary systems the companion star may have lost most of its hydrogen and donate helium-rich material to the compact star.
In such a scenario, the oceans would freeze solid within several million years, leaving only a few pockets of liquid water about 14 km (9 mi) underground. There is a remote chance that Earth will instead be captured by a passing binary star system, allowing the planet's biosphere to remain intact. The odds of this happening are about 1 in 3 ...
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.
Thus, the Sun occupies 0.00001% (1 part in 10 7) of the volume of a sphere with a radius the size of Earth's orbit, whereas Earth's volume is roughly 1 millionth (10 −6) that of the Sun. Jupiter, the largest planet, is 5.2 AU from the Sun and has a radius of 71,000 km (0.00047 AU; 44,000 mi), whereas the most distant planet, Neptune, is 30 AU ...
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. There are two distinct reactions in which four hydrogen nuclei may eventually result in one helium nucleus: the proton–proton chain reaction – which is responsible for most of the Sun's released energy – and the ...
The Sun and planets of the Solar System (distances not to scale). The Solar System is the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it. It formed about 4.6 billion years ago when a dense region of a molecular cloud collapsed, forming the Sun and a protoplanetary disc.