• Question: Could the sun get hotter each time?

    Asked by to Dre, Charli, Heather, Oliver, Becky on 20 Jun 2014. This question was also asked by .
    • Photo: Charlotte Flavell

      Charlotte Flavell answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Hi sirnyancat,

      I’m going to have to come clean here and admit that I really do not know much about this question at all! Here’s what I found though:

      The sun’s output can change naturally over time, and scientists have measured this. Currently we think that the sun hasn’t changed very much at all and if anything it may have slightly cooled. One thing we are pretty sure about though is that the natural variation in the energy from the sun could not account for steady rise in temperature that we have seen on this planet. This means that global warming is probably not just because of natural changes in the sun as some people have claimed.

      Hopefully some of the other scientists will be able to give you a better answer!

    • Photo: Rebecca Williams

      Rebecca Williams answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Hi Sirnyancat22,
      I think Charli is right. The sun hasn’t really changed its temperature over the Earth’s history.

      The sun makes its energy from turning hydrogen into helium. To do this, it has to lose some of its mass. So, the sun would actually cool over time (its like a fire burning out). But, it is thought that the sun will continue to be as hot as it is now for another 5000 million years! Phew, so I think we’re safe 🙂

    • Photo: Andrea Cristini

      Andrea Cristini answered on 20 Jun 2014:

      Hey sirnyancat22,

      So the sun will get hotter each time, but only each time it burns a new fuel. At the moment the sun’s fuel is hydrogen and it has a LOT of hydrogen! Enough to keep burning it for another 5 billion years! Even so the sun has burnt around half of its supply of hydrogen.

      The next fuel it will burn is helium, but before it does this when all the hydrogen fuel is gone the middle of the sun will start to shrink, so to balance this the outside will swell up like a balloon. It will be hot enough to then burn helium and this is what’s called a red giant. As it will look red and be really big, so big in fact that it will swallow up Mercury, Venus, probably the Earth and maybe even Mars.

      Even if it doesn’t swallow the Earth though, it will burn it to a crisp! Hopefully by that point future generations will have migrated to a safer part of the galaxy! Don’t worry though as like I say this definitely won’t happen for at least 4 billion years!

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