What’s a red giant?

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A red giant is a type of star. Its name is pretty self-explanatory: it’s red due to its relatively low temperature, and it’s one of the largest of all types of stars, 1,000 times more voluminous than our Sun. Betelgeuse, Antares, Aldebaran, and Arcturus are some famous giant stars visible from Earth to the naked eye.

A red giant is an aging star, and astrologers speculate that our Sun will become a red giant in about five billion years. Younger stars create energy through hydrogen fusion, which creates helium in the process, gradually causing the helium-to-hydrogen ratio within the star to increase. Hydrogen is found in the core of younger stars, but as a star ages and uses up its hydrogen supply, the hydrogen is confined to an outer shell, while the core is just helium.

In this scenario, the helium core has no fuel to burn, as helium fusion is only possible at very high temperatures, above 100 million Kelvin. Thus, the helium core begins to contract, while the hydrogen shell begins to expand. The star’s luminosity, or luminosity, increases by a factor of 1,000 to 10,000, as the hydrogen shell begins to burn cooler, taking on a red appearance and becoming a red giant. Red light is the lowest temperature of visible light, while warmer light appears white or blue.

When our Sun switches to hydrogen fusion in its shell and becomes a red giant, it will be the end of our solar system as we know it. A red giant instead of our Sun would go beyond the current Earth’s orbit. However, as part of the aging process, the Sun’s gravitational pull will weaken significantly, causing all the planets in the inner solar system, except Mercury, to drift apart. While Earth itself may survive the event, the ecosystem we know will be destroyed when the Sun burns brighter and Earth’s atmosphere more closely resembles that of present-day Venus, too hot to support life as it is on Earth. of today.

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