History Channel
Season. 5 Episode. 8 (Final)
http://www.history.com/shows/the-universe
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Universe_%28TV_series%29
EXCERPTS:
Dark Future of the Sun
"Over 1 million Earths can easily fit inside this gargantuan ball
of bubbling gas."
93 million miles away from Eath.
Core Temp. 30 million degrees Fahrenheit.
Here, H nuclei combine to form He nuclei.
This process called fusion
gives off radiant energy.
The Sun is actually White star, not yellow.
Our Sun will continue to churn out energy
over its entire lifetime,
which is estimated to be around 12 billion years.
(Sun is now 4.5 billion years old)
In one billion years
our star's luminosity
will be 10% greater
and the temperature of our planet
will be 100 degrees hotter.
GLOBAL WARMING
"The moisture in the air
is very good at trapping
infrared radiation or heat.
And so it's sort of like
putting a blanket on the Earth.
Now, here is the bad part.
As the Earth warms up,
the oceans evaporate even more,
which trap more heat
and so teh Earth warms up more.
And the Earth warms up more, again,
we trap more heat, and the effect run away.
This is what we call
The Greenhouse Effect.
Venus is 30% closer to the Sun than Earth is.
But its temp is more than 800.
When Sun is 10 billin years old,
it'll run out of hydrogen in its core.
Its the beginnig of the end of our sun,
and it'll not die peacfully.
Average star like our sun
will spend final 2 billion years of its life as a Red Giant.
Earth's future is uncertain
becaust it lies on the borderline
between being engulfed and surviving.
At the Lawrence Livmore National Labortary
in northern California,
Scientists are taking on
the challenge by attempting to create
a MINIATURE MAN-MADE STAR.
When the sun eventually cools off so much,
you won't even be able to see it with you eyes.
And so that's why some people call it a Black Dwarf
or a Dark Star.
It'll just be invisible, sitting there in space nearly forever.
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