Red Giant - The Sun As A Red Giant

The Sun As A Red Giant

See also: Sun#Life_phases

When the Sun has exhausted the hydrogen fuel in its core in around 5 billion years, it will begin to expand and at its largest it will approximately reach the orbit of the Earth, before losing its atmosphere completely to a planetary nebula and leaving the core to become a white dwarf. The evolution of the Sun into and through the red-giant phase has been extensively modelled, but it is still unclear whether the Earth will be engulfed by the Sun or will, barely, survive. At its brightest, the red-giant Sun will be several thousand times more luminous than today despite being around half the temperature.

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