The sun will become a planetary nebula in about 5 billion to 10 billion years when it dies, scientists from the University of Manchester said after building a predictive model of what the sun's future holds.
A full 90 percent of stars become planetary nebulae after they die, but not all astronomers were convinced that Earth’s sun had enough mass to do so.
“When a star dies it ejects a mass of gas and dust — known as its envelope — into space,” Manchester astronomer Albert Zijlstra said in a statement, UPI reported. “The envelope can be as much as half the star’s mass. This reveals the star’s core, which by this point in the star’s life is running out of fuel, eventually turning off before finally dying.”
The size and strength of the core determines whether a nebula occurs and for how long; radiation could be pumped out for 10,000 years, UPI reported.
Earth's sun is an average-sized star, but when it dies will engulf Mercury and Venus as a red giant, The Guardian reported. It will be on the lower limit of being able to form a planetary nebula, the computer model predicted, but it will get hot enough in time.
The model predicted that the sun’s brightness is increasing by about 10 percent every billion years, and will heat up the Earth so much in a billion years that it will not be able to sustain life, Science Alert reported.
Planetary nebulae have often been observed throughout the universe and are common, Science Alert noted. Some of the more famous nebulae are the Helix Nebula, the Cat’s Eye Nebula, and the Ring Nebula.
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