The End is Coming

Astronomers and physicists have been trying to figure out the ultimate fate of the Solar System for at least hundreds of years.  The Sun gets its energy by crushing hydrogen and other atoms until they fuse together, and this energy output leads to a loss in the Sun’s mass because it is converting around 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium every second, which is over 350 billion tonnes each day.  The Sun more or less maintains its size because it has a total mass of two billion, billion, billion tonnes, or two octillion tonnes.  The tonne is also called a Metric ton and that is equivalent to 1.10231 US tons, just to add to the confusion.  Over billions of years, the Sun will burn through so much of its fuel that it will begin to expand, ballooning out to become a colossal red giant star.  It is expected that…