Will the Sun Become a Black Hole When it Dies?

Will the Sun Become a Black Hole When it Dies?
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If our sun dies, will it become another black hole? originally appeared on Quora: the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.

Answer by Viktor T. Toth, IT pro, part-time physicist, on Quora:

If our sun dies, will it become another black hole? No, our Sun is much too small to become a black hole.

As it exhausts its hydrogen fuel, our Sun will start burning helium, swell in size and briefly become a red giant (giant in size, though not in mass), probably exceeding the size of the orbit of Venus. However, once the helium fuel is exhausted, the Sun will shrink to a white dwarf, still luminous because of the tremendous amount of heat trapped inside, but no longer burning any fuel. Thus a long cooling process begins, which represents the end stage for a star like our Sun.

Larger stars may have enough mass to produce the necessary pressures and temperatures deep inside their cores to fuse heavier elements, e.g., oxygen and carbon. But our Sun is just too small for this, so no such fusion will take place.

The end of life for those much larger stars may be very violent: as their fuel is exhausted, they reach a threshold when their core collapses rapidly, releasing tremendous amounts of energy that blow the rest of the star away. This is a so-called core collapse supernova. The remnant may turn into dwarf star; or if it is heavy enough (at least 50% heavier than our Sun at present) it may collapse further into a neutron star. Finally, if the remnant is at least roughly three times as heavy as our Sun, the collapse may not even stop there but continue, and a black hole would form.

But not in our Sun. As I said, our Sun is just too lightweight for these dramatic events. Its passing will be comparatively peaceful (though it will still scorch, perhaps even consume the Earth as it dies).

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