The sun has been shrinking for roughly 4.5 billion years. The size of the sun is a balance between the outward pressure from the release of energy from nuclear fission and the inward pull of gravity. The sun’s radius has become approximately 6% bigger over the past 4.5 billion years. However, the sun has enough hydrogen fuel to burn for approximately 10 billion years. This suggests that it has roughly 5 billion years left, which it will continue to expand at the same rate.
The core will eventually run out of hydrogen and when it does it will contract under the weight of gravity. However, some hydrogen fusion will occur in the upper layers. Once the core begins to contract, it heat up and causes the upper layers to expand due to the heat. The radius of the sun will increase due to the layers expanding which will form a red giant.
The radius of the red giant will be 100 times bigger than what it is now which is currently 696,000km. This means the Earth will plunge into the core of the red giant sun and be vaporized due to the sun lying just beyond Earth’s orbit. Once the red giant’s core becomes hot enough, this will cause the helium to fuse into carbon. When the helium fuel …show more content…
This is where nuclear reactions that cause some nuclei to merge and make others. The most important reaction within the core is the proton-proton cycle. The photons in the proton-proton chain reaction, hydrogen nuclei are converted into helium nuclei. This reaction produces high energy photons that move through the radioactive layer surrounding the core. It takes millions of years to get through this layer into the convective layer. This is due to the photons getting constantly intercepted, absorbed and re-emitted. The energy produced by fusion is then transported to the solar surface and emitted as light as high energy