Stars like our Sun burn for about nine or 10
Earth will interact tidally with the Sun's outer atmosphere, which would decrease Earth's orbital radius. Drag from the chromosphere of the Sun would reduce Earth's orbit. These effects will counterbalance the impact of mass loss by the Sun, and the Sun will likely engulf Earth in about 7.59 billion years.
But in about 5 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen.
When the Sun exhausts its store of nuclear fuel, some 5 billion years from now, it will evolve into a bloated red giant, gobbling up Mercury and Venus, and scorching the Earth. After ejecting its outer layers in the form of a colourful planetary nebula, the Sun will then be compressed into a tiny white dwarf star.
Scientists predict the Sun is a little less than halfway through its lifetime and will last another 5 billion years or so before it becomes a white dwarf.
In a few billion years, the sun will become a red giant so large that it will engulf our planet. But the Earth will become uninhabitable much sooner than that. After about a billion years the sun will become hot enough to boil our oceans. The sun is currently classified as a “main sequence” star.
And what forces are acting on our planet and our star to make this happen? In short, the sun is getting farther away from Earth over time. On average, Earth is about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from the sun, according to NASA.
With no sunlight, photosynthesis would stop, but that would only kill some of the plants—there are some larger trees that can survive for decades without it. Within a few days, however, the temperatures would begin to drop, and any humans left on the planet's surface would die soon after.
In five billion years, the sun is expected to expand, becoming what is known as a red giant. “In this process of the sun becoming a red giant, it's likely going to obliterate the inner planets … likely Mercury and Venus will be destroyed,” Blackman said. Earth may survive the event, but will not be habitable.
Our sun is a yellow dwarf and is currently 15 million degrees Celsius. But, it will lose that heat as it slowly dies over the next several billion years. Image by NASA/SDO (AIA). The sun is far larger than any of the planets, and is made up mostly of hydrogen.
Some astronomers expect our Sun to enter its solar maximum in 2025, if not before. The solar maximum, the highest peak in solar activity during a solar cycle, means the Sun's magnetic field will be at its strongest and most disordered.
So, while Earth will eventually leave the solar system one way or another, it's not something we will have to worry about for a few billion years yet.
While the Sun is not getting hotter, the amount of radiation being trapped in Earth's atmosphere is increasing due to the burning of fossil fuels.
There will be "far worse extreme weather events than those we see today. withering droughts, epic floods, deadly hurricanes, and almost inconceivably hot heatwaves; a typical summer day in midlatitude regions like the U.S. will resemble the hottest day we have thus far ever seen." Dr.
India will overtake China as the most populated country on Earth. Nigeria will overtake the US as the third most populous country in the world. The fastest-growing demographic will be the elderly: 65+ people will hit one billion by 2030. We will need to figure out ways of how to accommodate 100+ people at work.
All of Earth would be in permanent darkness; the air and oceans would retain warmth for some time, but all life would eventually freeze to death.
Will the Sun become a black hole? No, it's too small for that! The Sun would need to be about 20 times more massive to end its life as a black hole.
Without the Sun's heat and light, the Earth would be a lifeless ball of ice-coated rock. The Sun warms our seas, stirs our atmosphere, generates our weather patterns, and gives energy to the growing green plants that provide the food and oxygen for life on Earth.
Eternal night would fall over the planet and Earth will start traveling into interstellar space at 18 miles per second. Within 2 seconds, the full moon reflecting the sun's rays on the dark side of the planet would also go dark.
The gravitational pull of the moon moderates Earth's wobble, keeping the climate stable. That's a boon for life. Without it, we could have enormous climate mood swings over billions of years, with different areas getting extraordinarily hot and then plunging into long ice ages.
Remarkably, life on Earth only has a billion or so years left. There is some uncertainty in the calculations, but recent results suggest 1.5 billion years until the end. That is a much shorter span of time than the five billion years until the planet is engulfed by the Sun.
Earth's temperature has risen by an average of 0.14° Fahrenheit (0.08° Celsius) per decade since 1880, or about 2° F in total. The rate of warming since 1981 is more than twice as fast: 0.32° F (0.18° C) per decade.
Everything in the galaxy orbits the center of the combined mass of the entire galaxy and not the supermassive black hole that happens to be at the center. This image shows an artistic depiction of our galaxy.