The sun on its final journey how will it swallow the planets and turn into a white dwarf?

The Earth may lose its ability to support life in about a billion years from now, not because of an asteroid impact or a sudden cosmic explosion, but as a result of the gradual change in the sun that gives it light and warmth.

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The star that appears stationary in the sky slowly increases in brightness, and will become hotter and more influential on our planet's climate in the future, before undergoing a series of enormous transformations that end with it shrinking into a small, dense object known as a "white dwarf".

Astronomical calculations reveal that the sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old, has not yet reached the middle of all the transformations it will undergo, and that its final fate will not be realized until more than 12 billion years after its birth.

Interestingly, the end will not begin with the sun going out or its temperature decreasing, but quite the opposite; it will become brighter, then swell to unimaginable sizes, before shedding most of its outer layers and leaving behind a very dense core.

Most importantly for the inhabitants of Earth, the planet may become uninhabitable long before the sun reaches the red giant stage, which makes the future of life on Earth different from the future of the planet itself.

A nuclear furnace that has been operating for 4.6 billion years

To understand what will happen to the sun, we must first understand the secret that keeps it shining for so long. At the sun's core, where temperatures reach about 15 million degrees Celsius, a process called "thermonuclear fusion" takes place, in which hydrogen nuclei fuse to form helium nuclei , and a small amount of mass is converted into enormous energy.

This process takes place through a series of reactions known as the "proton-proton chain," and ends with the conversion of 4 hydrogen nuclei into one helium nucleus.

Every second, the sun converts approximately 600 million tons of hydrogen into roughly 596 million tons of helium. The difference, about 4 million tons, is converted into energy that the sun radiates in all directions.

The resulting radiant power is about 400 trillion trillion watts, an astonishing amount of energy that makes what the sun emits in one second more than 600,000 times greater than the energy that humanity is estimated to consume in a whole year.