What will the Sun look like when it dies?

Planetary nebulae are the final butterfly-like state that heralds the end of a Sun-like star's energy-generating life. They form when stars up to eight times the mass of the Sun begin to die, bloating into red giants before shedding as much as half their mass as gas and dust nebulae.

The Sun itself will begin its death throes in about 5 billion years, when it starts to swell into a red giant star. Though it's not clear exactly what its planetary nebula will look like – its shape will likely be sculpted by factors such as the Sun's future magnetic field – observations of the 1600 or so known planetary nebulae suggest our star will go out in a blaze of glory.

Lasting no more than a few tens of thousands of years, planetary nebulae help seed space with heavier chemical elements that can be incorporated into the next generation of stars. A new book called Galaxy: Exploring the Milky Way by Stuart Clark features some absolutely spectacular images of these nebulae.



http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn16822-what-will-the-sun-look-like-when-it-dies.html

We only have a few billion years before the Sun swallows us up.

Close flybys by moderate sized asteroids transfer kinetic energy via gravitational attraction..

It's kind of the flip side of the way deep space probes to the outer planets use close flybys of inner planets to gain velocity/momentum. In both cases the planet changes velocity but in one case it gains momentum and in the other it loses it.

The only real problem is how to alter the orbits of the asteroids in order to do the close flybys.

http://qntm.org/?destroy

many are technologically feasible in the next few centuries...

sP

thank you!!

for me and my students over the years...

sP

:evilgrin:

Sid

I mean, really.

Oh...wait...this won't happen for a couple of billion years?

Never mind.

dark, and then begin to cool. Soon it won't matter if we are fat or skinny, or if our kids are special, or if we pushed carts back to the store causing an old man to lose his job.

ohhhh freaky.

:shrug:

i only care about what it's going to look like tomorrow.

and go to the end of the world celebraration .