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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'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 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.
The Sun emits light across the visible spectrum, so its color is white, with a CIE color-space index near (0.3, 0.3), when viewed from space or when the Sun is high in the sky. The Solar radiance per wavelength peaks in the green portion of the spectrum when viewed from space.
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 ...
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
Each second, the Sun fuses approximately 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium in a process known as the proton–proton chain (4 hydrogens form 1 helium), converting about 4 million tons of matter to energy. [1] [2] Besides the Sun, other well-known examples of G-type main-sequence stars include Alpha Centauri, Tau Ceti, and 51 Pegasi. [3 ...
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 ...