Sun.Star Pampanga

THE TRANSFORMA­TION OF THE SUN

- MARIE CATHERINE B. ACOSTA --oOo-The author is Teacher II at San Vicente-San Francisco High School

What if the universe changes its course and the sun starts to transform itself and turn into a black hole and eventually end up as a white dwarf star? What would be your outlook in perceiving the upcoming permanent change in our solar system? What if the sun’s destiny reached its final course, what would you do? These are just the possible questions to be answered once we get there. The sun is known as the closest star that revolved in our solar system and it was believed that it was existed around 4.6 billion years ago. It was formed through a giant space cloud made of gas and dust collided with some super intense energy waves and collapsed on itself.

The sun’s nuclear fusion reactions on its core and each second these huge nuclear reactor converts 600 million tons of hydrogen into helium which is the source of its heat and light. But according to experts’ opinion and scientific speculatio­n, billions years from now the sun will run out of its hydrogen fuel and helium ash will build up in the sun’s core that would become unstable that resulted to its collapsed under its own weight. The core would be hotter and the sun itself would be expanding and turn into a Red Giant that is big enough to swallow the two nearby planets Mercury and Venus. Even the planet earth where we live in would be disappeare­d inside this hot swollen star that would ignite helium inside the core will create enormous blaze.

What would happen next is that, the sun as ared giant will turn into a red-giant branch which its size will expand into 10 times larger from its normal size that would eventually end up in a white dwarf star with no significan­t power to give heat and light to support life system on earth. At that rate, the next scene that will appear in our very naked eyes would be unbearable. The Sun would shine 10% brighter good enough to make the planet earth shows significan­t changes. The earth would be baked with the same amount of heat. The oceans would start evaporatin­g and all the plants would burn to a crisp. Plant-eating animals would begin to starve and the waters of the oceans can boil chicken in a glimpse.

With this intense transforma­tion of the sun, we are fortunate that this event will occur 5 billion years from now. But still we can’t deny the fact that although we are not directly responsibl­e in the intergalac­tic transforma­tion of the sun, we are still capable of doing what is right for our mother earth to at least support in mitigating the visible violent effect of a so called climate change due to inevitable permanent change hanging in the universe.

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