What Would Happen If Our Sun Exploded?

It’s common knowledge that our Sun, a star in our Solar System, has a finite lifetime. In the past, we’ve been able to witness the ‘death’ of several other stars in our galaxy with very powerful and bright explosions — an event we call a supernova.

When supernovas happen, plenty of dust (the stardust) is released into space and sometimes we can see these bits of dust rapidly burning up in the night sky as shooting stars or even a flurry of shooting stars. This released dust is not usually lost but will be ‘used’ to make new stars and planets. Our Solar System and our own Earth, for example, actually consists of these very same dust materials from explosions of past stars.

In fact, all life on earth, including us humans, essentially originates from this stardust.

A very important thing to understand is that scientifically, it’s impossible for our Sun to achieve a true supernova state. The latest researches have suggested that only stars 10 times larger than our Sun can explode in a true supernova. The Sun’s energy is produced through a fusion reaction, which combines hydrogen into helium, generating immense energy and maintaining a delicate balance that prevents it from collapsing or exploding.

However, that’s not saying our Sun exploding is completely impossible, it’s just when it does happen, it’s likely to be much slower and much less powerful than a supernova. Instead of bursting instantly, if our Sun explodes, it will be more akin to a gradual deflation of a balloon.

Will Our Sun Ever Explode?

Unfortunately, the answer is yes. The sun, after all, is a star, and all stars will explode in due time, but fortunately, this won’t happen anytime soon, and definitely not in our lifetime. According to scientists, our Sun will only explode when it runs out of fuel in around 5 billion years, so it’s still a very very long time in the future.

When the Sun starts to die, it will gradually expand and becoming slightly colder, turning into what we call a red giant. It will get so big and it will eventually eat Mercury and Venus, the two closest planets, followed by Earth.

As a red giant, the Sun will start releasing its outer layers to reach outside the solar system. It will get smaller and smaller due to this phenomenon, eventually becoming a white dwarf. The white dwarf is essentially the core of a star. The sun’s core plays a crucial role in its lifecycle, driving nuclear fusion and energy production. It is extremely heavy, weighing almost as much as the Sun itself while being only as big as the Earth.

It is made of very dense material and according to NASA, a teaspoon of a white dwarf would weigh as heavy as 13,000 lbs. When the Sun reaches this white dwarf state, Mercury, Venus, and Earth will be gone—eaten by the Sun during the red giant state — but most of our Solar System will still be around.

Scientists continue to study the sun’s future to understand when these changes will occur and their implications for the Solar System.

How Long Can We Live Without The Sun?

How Long Can We Live Without the Sun?

The Sun, our Solar System’s powerhouse, is crucial for life on Earth, providing both energy and heat. Without it, Earth’s ecosystems would collapse. But how long could we survive?

Initially, not much would change. The Sun’s light takes about 8.5 minutes to reach Earth, so we wouldn’t notice its absence immediately. However, once the Sun’s light vanishes, Earth would plunge into darkness, and temperatures would begin to drop rapidly.

Within a week, Earth’s average surface temperature would fall below 0º F (-18º C), drastically affecting life. Photosynthesis would cease, leading to the death of plants, followed by herbivores and carnivores. Oceans would start to freeze over, but some deep-sea life might persist thanks to Earth’s internal heat.

After a month, humanity would likely face extinction unless relocated to another habitable planet. As temperatures continue to plummet, Earth’s atmosphere would freeze and fall to the surface within a thousand years, exposing the planet to cosmic radiation. This would make survival impossible without the Sun’s protective warmth and gravitational pull.

In this frozen, dark world, the gravitational pull keeping planets in orbit would also vanish. Earth and other planets would drift aimlessly through space, increasing the risk of collisions with other celestial bodies. Even if some life managed to survive initially, the lack of sunlight and the ensuing cold would eventually lead to extinction.

Life Without the Sun: A Timeline of Events

If the Sun Explodes, Will We See It?

The short answer? Yes. Over billions of years, the sun’s brightness will increase by about 10 percent, which will have catastrophic effects on Earth, potentially vaporizing its oceans and altering its atmosphere long before the sun’s eventual death as a red giant.

In fact, most likely we’ll have enough time to scream and be panicked, and then it will get extremely hot very fast. It’s important to remember that the Sun is located so far away from our Earth, 93 million miles (147.14 million km) to be exact.

So, the light emitted from the Sun, as mentioned above, takes around eight minutes and 20 seconds to finally reach our planet since the Sun’s rays can only travel as fast as the speed of light. So, even when an explosion happens, it would also take around eight and a half minutes before we finally realize it.

The thing is, when the sun does explode, it will release an extremely massive amount of energy towards the Earth (and other planets/objects). It is expected that the Sun would release the energy equals to explosions from a few octillion nuclear warheads to Earth.

The heat, pressure, and radiation from the explosion, however, will reach Earth much much later than the explosion since they travel at a much slower pace than the speed of light. How much later? Nobody is sure, but once the blast does reach the Earth’s surface, it will almost immediately kill all life on Earth.

Even if some lifeforms on Earth somehow survived the blast, the resulting radiation will kill them slowly but surely. So, yes, we’ll most likely be able to witness the explosion of the sun when it does happen.

If the Sun Exploded would it Create a Black Hole?

The short answer is no; our Sun is not massive enough to become a black hole, even if it exploded. For a star to collapse into a black hole, it must be at least 20 times more massive than our Sun.

The Sun’s future does involve an explosion, but not in the catastrophic sense of a supernova. Instead, the Sun will enter the red giant phase, expanding outward and swallowing Mercury and Venus. This process will eventually lead to the Sun shedding its outer layers, leaving behind a white dwarf.

The white dwarf, the sun’s core remnant, is incredibly dense but lacks the sufficient mass needed for core collapse into a black hole. In more massive stars, the core collapses under enough pressure and heat, leading to a supernova. The remnant could then become a neutron star or, if massive enough, a black hole. However, our Sun’s demise lacks the necessary gravitational pull and mass to undergo such transformations.

As the Sun dies, it will burn helium and shrink, but it won’t have the energy or mass to create a black hole. This means the rocky planets, including Earth, won’t face the threat of a black hole forming in our Solar System.

Instead, the Sun will cool and fade as a dead star, maintaining a stable, albeit dim, presence in the Milky Way. Thus, while the Sun’s explosion won’t lead to a black hole, it highlights the fascinating lifecycle differences between massive stars and our relatively modest Sun.

Interesting Facts About Our Sun

What’s Actually Inside Our Sun?

Our Sun, the star of our Solar System, is essentially a giant sphere of superheated gas materials. We can further divide the Sun into several layers:

At the very center, the Sun’s core, is the fusion of hydrogen to form helium. The fusion process is the one generating the Sun’s light and massive heat, generating more than 15 million degrees Kelvin of heat. These nuclear reactions, including nuclear fusion, are crucial for the Sun’s energy production and emission over its life cycle.

The Sun also generates a massive amount of gravity, which balances out the pressure from the heat in its core, maintaining the spherical shape.

Above the core, we can find the radiative zone and the convective zone. The temperatures are already much cooler, around 7,000 to 8,000 L. Eventually, heat will reach the Photosphere on the outer layers of the Sun. The Photosphere is around 500 km thick, and this is the layer where most of the Sun’s radiation and rays finally escape, and this is also where sunspots happen.

Above the Photosphere is the Chromosphere, which literally can be translated into “sphere of color”, that we can observe during the total solar eclipse. The temperature in this layer increases back up to 50,000K, but the mass density is 100,000 times less than the Photosphere.

Finally, above the Chromosphere is the Sun’s Corona (the ‘crown’), the Sun’s outermost layer where the solar wind is released out of the Sun toward the solar system. The Corona has a temperature of millions of degrees Kelvin, much hotter than the layer below it.

How the Corona could be so hot is still a mystery, but scientists suspect that it is due to millions of tiny flares (nanoflares) heating the Corona periodically.

What is the Sun Made Of?

As discussed, Hydrogen and Helium are the two core elements found not only in the Sun’s core but in the whole Sun itself.

Hydrogen and Helium make up around 98% of the Sun’s total mass, but for the remaining 2%, other heavier elements are there and they actually play important roles in the nuclear fusion process that generates the Sun’s heat and energy.

Lithium, Beryllium, and Boron are sometimes formed during the nuclear fusion process which combines Hydrogen atoms to produce helium as intermediate products.

Heavier elements are also present throughout the Sun’s layers but aren’t involved in the nuclear fusion process. It is expected that these heavier elements come from the remains of previous stars in our Solar System or its neighbors.

However, these heavier elements aren’t prominent enough in quantity to allow a supernova to happen.

If Our Sun Dies, Will The Planets Still Orbit It?

As discussed above, when our sun finally dies, it will ‘explode’ into a Red Giant for a while before shrinking into a White Dwarf state. Mercury, Venus, and probably Earth would be eaten by the Sun during the Red Giant state, but not the other planets.

So, would these remaining planets still orbit the sun as it loses its mass? Since the mass-loss process occurs over a long period of time (can take as long as billions of years), so yes, the planets would still stay bound to the sun.

If, for example, the Sun instantly loses half or so of its mass, the planets would be released from their orbits and would all fly off into deep space since the Sun will dramatically lose its gravity.

What would happen is that the Sun will move gradually farther away from the Sun (or what’s remaining of it) while gradually also losing their orbits. This phenomenon is known as adiabatic orbit expansion.

So, the outer planets will keep orbiting the Sun for the billions of years it will take for the Sun to completely ‘die’ before they will fly off into deep space.

Can the Sun Collide With Other Stars?

While it is extremely rare, it is indeed possible for stars to collide with each other, especially in the denser parts of our galaxy in massive star clusters.

Will the sun explode when, hypothetically, it collides with another star? The answer is that it would depend on how fast the stars are moving and/or how hard the impact is.

If the star and our Sun are moving relatively slowly, then the two stars will instead merge into a bigger star we call a blue straggler. It will become much brighter, bluer, and hotter than our current Sun, so it will probably not be good news for life on Earth.

If, however, the two stars are moving very fast during impact, then it can lead to a massive supernova, and might not leave anything at all except Hydrogen gas spread out all over the galaxy.

Conclusion

The Sun’s eventual demise is a topic of great intrigue and speculation, with various theories surrounding its ‘death.’ Fortunately, our Sun’s life expectancy is not a pressing concern for us, as it is predicted to have approximately 5 billion years of fuel remaining before any significant explosion occurs.

This means that such an event is unlikely to happen within our lifetimes, allowing us to continue to enjoy the Sun’s warmth and light for many generations to come.