In this episode of Let's Dive In, Julie and Phil speak with South Pole Station winter resident Allen Foster to find out what would happen if the sun exploded?
First things first, there is no need to panic! Everything will be OK for another 4 or 5 billion years!!
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Julie tells us more about this episode...
Happy New Year everyone! We hope you had a fantastic festive season and we're excited to be back with another great question from 10-year-old Bobby - What happens if the sun explodes?
Allen Foster, a PhD student at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, USA, just spent his first season as an overwinter at the South Pole Station. That means that he spent the polar winter - from February until November 2022 - working in extreme conditions to keep the South Pole Telescope (SPT) operating. The SPT is one of three experiments at the south pole and is a cosmic microwave background measuring instrument. That means that they’re looking for the very first light particles that came from the early universe.
Allen’s job is really cool (literally!) so we’ll make sure to have a little extra episode with more details about life down at the South Pole soon. But in the meantime, what does Allen think would happen if the sun were to explode?
(NOTE: all of this is theoretical for now - the sun won’t explode for another few billion years!)
"Well it wouldn’t be pretty," says Allen. Anything that is facing the sun would be fried. Great.
So, diving in a little deeper - why would the sun explode? Is it because of aliens? Did people send a rocket to explode the sun, just to see what would happen?
The Sun at the centre of our solar system, our sun, will not actually explode at the end of it’s lifetime, says Allen. The Sun is what astrophysicists call a main sequence star, and will stay like that for another 4-5 billion years.
"Our sun basically burns up all of its fuel…and once it does that the suns outer layers will start expanding out." After that, it will expand to become a red giant.
How does this work? Well, the sun has layers (like an onion, or a puff pastry!). The outer layers, which we can’t see, are called the corona and the chromosphere. These are very light (not light light, but heavy light). And in the middle is the core - a dense centre that is heavy.
When the sun is transforming into a red giant, the heavy stuff all falls to the centre of the sun and this forces the outer layers to expand. "These outer layers poof, they poof up, and get really big." The "poofy layers" move away to about 1 Earth - Sun distance, swallowing up Mercury, Venus, Earth, and maybe a bit of Mars. But beyond that - who knows?
Although these things are hypothetical, Allen does actually study things like this with the South Pole Telescope. Why not tune into the episode to find out more about Allen’s research!
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AND read all the Let's Dive In articles with experiments to try at home HERE!
