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About 4.6 billion years ago
- The sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago. Many scientists think the sun and the rest of the solar system formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula. As the nebula collapsed because of its gravity, it spun faster and flattened into a disk. Most of the material was pulled toward the center to form the sun.
www.space.com › 58-the-sun-formation-facts-and-characteristics
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Jun 9, 2021 · The sun was born about 4.6 billion years ago. Many scientists think the sun and the rest of the solar system formed from a giant, rotating cloud of gas and dust known as the solar nebula.
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- Charles Q. Choi
- 2 min
- The Birth of the Sun: According to Nebular Theory, the Sun and all the planets of our Solar System began as a giant cloud of molecular gas and dust. Then, about 4.57 billion years ago, something happened that caused the cloud to collapse.
- The Main Sequence: The Sun, like most stars in the Universe, is on the main sequence stage of its life, during which nuclear fusion reactions in its core fuse hydrogen into helium.
- Core Hydrogen Exhaustion: All things must end. That is true for us, that is true for the Earth, and that is true for the Sun. It’s not going to happen anytime soon, but one day in the distant future, the Sun will run out of hydrogen fuel and slowly slouch towards death.
- Final Phase and Death: Once it reaches the Red-Giant-Branch (RGB) phase, the Sun will haves approximately 120 million years of active life left. But much will happen in this amount of time.
Sun begins to ascend the red-giant branch of the Hertzsprung–Russell diagram, growing dramatically more luminous (by a factor of up to 2,700), larger (by a factor of up to 250 in radius), and cooler (down to 2600 K): Sun is now a red giant. Mercury, Venus and possibly Earth are swallowed.
The Sun formed about 4.6 billion years ago from the collapse of part of a giant molecular cloud that consisted mostly of hydrogen and helium and that probably gave birth to many other stars. This age is estimated using computer models of stellar evolution and through nucleocosmochronology.
Our Sun is a 4.5 billion-year-old yellow dwarf star – a hot glowing ball of hydrogen and helium – at the center of our solar system. It’s about 93 million miles (150 million kilometers) from Earth and it’s our solar system’s only star. Without the Sun’s energy, life as we know it could not exist on our home planet.
Apr 24, 2023 · Born 4.6 billion years ago, our star is well into midlife and has wandered far from its ancestral home—some nameless, now vanished “stellar nursery” of gas that long ago dispersed or...
