Will the Sun be able to fuse helium?

But our Sun won’t go supernova, and won’t ever make those elements. Instead, our Sun will burn through the hydrogen in its core, and then will contract and heat up until it can begin fusing helium in its core.

How long will the Sun fuse helium?

The Sun will remain in a Red Giant phase for about 120 million years. At this point, the core of the Sun, when it reaches the right temperature and pressure, will start fusing helium into carbon, then carbon and helium into oxygen, neon and helium into magnesium, and so on all the way up to iron.

What does the Sun fuse helium into?

carbon
When the temperature in the core reaches about 100 million degrees, the helium will begin to fuse into carbon by a reaction known as the triple-alpha process, because it converts three helium nuclei into one carbon atom. This generates a great deal of heat.

What will the Sun fuse in the future?

In approximately 5 billion years, the sun will begin the helium-burning process, turning into a red giant star. When it expands, its outer layers will consume Mercury and Venus, and reach Earth.

Will our Sun become a white dwarf?

Like the vast majority of stars in our Milky Way galaxy, the sun will eventually collapse into a white dwarf, an exotic object about 200,000 times denser than Earth. “The sun itself will become a crystal white dwarf in about 10 billion years.”

Will the Sun turn into a black hole?

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. In some 6 billion years it will end up as a white dwarf — a small, dense remnant of a star that glows from leftover heat.

Will our sun ever burn out?

Eventually, the fuel of the sun – hydrogen – will run out. When this happens, the sun will begin to die. But don’t worry, this should not happen for about 5 billion years. After the hydrogen runs out, there will be a period of 2-3 billion years whereby the sun will go through the phases of star death.

How will sun end its life?

Once all the helium disappears, the forces of gravity will take over, and the sun will shrink into a white dwarf. All the outer material will dissipate, leaving behind a planetary nebula. Astronomers estimate that the sun has about 7 billion to 8 billion years left before it sputters out and dies.

Will our sun become a white dwarf?

Will the sun ever burnout?

In about 5.5 billion years the Sun will run out of hydrogen and begin expanding as it burns helium. It will swap from being a yellow giant to a red giant, expanding beyond the orbit of Mars and vaporizing Earth—including the atoms that make-up you.

How does the Sun fuse helium and hydrogen?

This is known as a helium flash. The core expands with all of the heat from the helium flash, and cools as it expands until it finds a new equilibrium. At that point helium fusion continues in a shell around the carbon core, and hydrogen fusion in a shell further out. The sun is not massive enough to fuse carbon or oxygen to neon and magnesium.

What happens when the Sun’s core is exhausted of helium?

Instead it just becomes mildly larger and more luminous over about 100 million years as it continues to burn helium in the core. When the helium is exhausted, the Sun will repeat the expansion it followed when the hydrogen in the core was exhausted, except that this time it all happens faster, and the Sun becomes larger and more luminous.

Will all of the hydrogen in the Sun be used up?

Not all of the hydrogen will be used up. The core of the Sun does not mix with the outer layers, which maintain their original elemental composition. The core will compress and get hotter as hydrogen there is depleted and helium accumulates. Hydrogen fusion in the core slows down, but it continues in a shell at the edge of the core.

What happens to the helium inside a star?

What happens to the Helium? Most stars, after converting a significant portion of their hydrogen to helium undergo an internal change. The internal core collapses, and heats up, until it is hot enough to fuse helium into larger atoms, for instance, by combining three helium atoms into carbon.