We are almost done with exploring heavenly bodies in this year’s April’s A-Z challenge. Y is for Yellow Dwarf. No, I don’t mean Snow White’s Asian suitor, but a “g-type main-sequence star.” All that gobble-goop means is a star like our sun! These stars range in color from white to slightly yellow. Our sun is actually a white star but appears more yellow because of our atmosphere. This is something one might lose sleep over. Our sun is burning 4 million tons of fuel a second. Imagine that number, 4 million tons a second! As it consumes this much fuel, it is producing the equivalent energy of 60 billion times the electricity produced by all the world’s power plants. The sun can’t keep this up. Sooner or later the sun will run out of fuel and then all our investments in solar energy will be wasted. What are we to do?
Well, don’t sweat it, for as the sun begins to run short on fuel, it’ll throw one final party as it bellows itself into a red giant. Then you’ll sweat it, but not for long for the earth will be consumed (as will we). But don’t worry too much, that shouldn’t happen for another 4.5 billion years or so. Chances are, we’ll all be long gone or have blown each other up by then. After that last big party, the sun will dump a lot of its excessive matter, forming a planetary nebula as the core gradually shrink into a white dwarf.