Exploration Talks

what will happen when our sun dies ? If you worry about when the sun will die, never fear: that moment is billions of years away. The sun gives energy to life on Earth, and without this star, we wouldn't be here. But even stars have limited lifetimes, and someday our sun will die. You don't need to worry about this solar death anytime soon, though. Like all stars, a churning fusion engine fuels the sun, and it still has a lot of fuel left — about 5 billion years' worth.    Stars like our sun form when a huge cloud of gas (mostly hydrogen and helium) grows so large that it collapses under its own weight. The pressure is so high in the center of that collapsing mass of gas that the heat reaches unimaginable levels, with temperatures so hot that hydrogen atoms lose their electrons. Those naked hydrogen atoms then fuse together into helium atoms, and that reaction releases enough energy to counter the intense pressure of gravity collapsing the cloud of gas. The b...

 The closest star to Earth is a triple-star system called Alpha Centauri.   The two main stars are Alpha Centauri A and Alpha Centauri B, which form a binary pair. They are about 4.35 light-years from Earth, according to NASA (opens in new tab). The third star is called Proxima Centauri or Alpha Centauri C, and it is about 4.25 light-years from Earth, making it the closest star other than the sun. According to NASA, Alpha Centauri A and B are on average about 23 astronomical units (AU) from each other — a little more than the distance between the sun and Uranus. (An astronomical unit is the average distance between Earth and the sun, which equals 92,955,807 miles or 149,597,870 kilometers.) The closest the two stars ever come to each other is 11 astronomical units, according to NASA (opens in new tab)   To the naked eye, the Alpha Centauri A and B shine as one, making them the third brightest "star" in our night sky. The two separate stars can be seen through a small...