Staring into the Eye of Star Death

Visiting the Helix

One of the often-asked questions astronomers get is “What will happen when the Sun dies?”  It’s an obvious concern, since whatever happens to the Sun will affect Earth, but it’s not an immediate concern.  The death of the Sun isn’t going to happen for another few billion years yet, so we don’t have to worry about facing it grow larger during its red giant stage and then shrink down to become a tiny ghost of its former brilliance.  Many, many generations of humans will live and die on our planet before future astronomers will start to detect the first instabilities that indicate the Sun’s upcoming demise.

There are stars like the Sun out there in space that have already gone through the death process, and so astronomers study them to understand what our star will look like when it finally gets down to the serious business of stardeath. One of the objects they have studied quite a bit is called the Helix Nebula.

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