end of the world

[crazie]

will there actually be an end to the world like this solar system will blow up and dissappear forever???????????

[jake-the-peg]

The sun only has so much fuel. Right now it's using Hydrogen to make helium and that's why it burns.

One day (in about 5 billion years) it'll run out of hydrogen and start burning helium, it'll expand and cool to the point that it will suck in the inner planets including the earth.

But given that that is as far in the future as the sun's birth is in the past I don't think we've much to worry about.

5 billion years was enough time for life to evolve from single cells so I very much doubt that the eyes that gaze on the sun turning into a red giant will be anything close to what you'd recognise as human

[thatman]

Apparently our galaxy is on a collision course with the Andromeda galaxy so that would be the end.

[mibn2cweus]

Due to the vast distances between stars a collision between the Sun or a planet in our solar system and a star in a passing or merging galaxy is extremely unlikely.

[Zevon]

mibn2cweus, given that space is mostly nothing and considering that gravity has an infinite range then it is highly likely that things will collide, gravity is pulling them towards each other and there is nothing to act against it.
If you wait long enough most things will saccrue in a big lump. But not a big crunch! that is the universe crushing stuff together not gravity.

[mibn2cweus]

Zevon,

By the time the composite galaxy formed by the union of our Milky Way Galaxy with Andromeda concludes in the collapse of that galaxy, the fact that they were once two distinct galaxies will have long been ancient history.

By comparison, in terms of one human lifetime, the wedding would have taken place in the morning of the first day in lives of the two galaxies! Later on, (still within the first day of their existence), the Earth would have been devoured by the Sun.

I hope this helps to put events in perspective.