The Sun Is Going To Turn Into A Giant Crystal Orb

Don’t worry, it’s going to take a few billion years.

Our sun will one day freeze into a giant crystal orb, joining billions of stars in the cold vastness of space.

New research reported by the Los Angeles Times reveals that billions of years after our sun boils its last bit of heat off, the giant star will shrink into a freezing, dead, crystal sphere.

“In tens of billions of years from now, the universe will be made largely of dense crystal spheres,” Pier-Emmanuel Tremblay, an astrophysicist at the University of Warwick in England, who led the work published this week in Nature, told the LA Times. “In the future, these objects will be completely dominant,” he added.

Between 5 and 6 billion years from now the sun will run out of hydrogen causing its core to shrink for about 500 to 1 billion years until the star begins to contact again.

Once the star releases its last bits of energy created by fusing helium, it enters the white dwarf stage when the star is made up primarily of carbon gas and oxygen. White dwarf stars do not generate their own energy, so they cool rapidly.

Due to the rapid cooling process, scientists can only observe these dying stars for a limited amount of time. Once the energy has been spent, telescopes can no longer see the once magnificently shining globes.

Before they turn into a giant crystal orb, a white dwarf star releases one last bit of energy as matter crystallizes from liquid into a solid.

Prior to this study, researchers were aware of the crystallization process but weren’t sure if energy was released during the formation. Their findings have confirmed that the stars do in fact spit out one last bit of energy before they finally retire.

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