Thursday, December 14, 2006

What if the Sun become a black hole?


The Sun will not become a black hole. Only stars that weigh considerably more than the Sun end their lives as black holes. The Sun appears to have been active for 4.6 billion years and has enough fuel to go on for another five billion years or so. At the end of its life, the Sun will start to fuse helium into heavier elements and begin to swell up, ultimately growing so large that it will swallow the Earth. After a billion years as a red giant, it will suddenly collapse into a white dwarf -- the final end product of a star like ours. It may take a trillion years to cool off completely. What if the Sun did become a black hole for some reason? The main effect is that it would get very dark and very cold around here. The Earth and the other planets would not get sucked into the black hole; they would keep on orbiting in exactly the same paths they follow right now. Why? Because the horizon of this black hole would be very small -- only about 3 kilometers -- as long as you stay well outside the horizon, Earth will not being sucked into the black hole.
For more details of the end of Sun,you can visit this interesting website :http://nrumiano.free.fr/Estars/fading.html

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