Question: When will the sun explode

Jack Carlyle answered on 7 Nov 2015:

The Sun is about 4 and a half billion years old, but the life of a star isn’t quite as simple as you might think! In another four and a half billion years, the Sun will become a “red giant”, becoming a hundred times bigger and glowing red rather than yellow. At this point this Earth will be consumed by the Sun, but it isn’t the end of the story! A few million years later, the Sun will shrink back to an even smaller star than it is now and become white – known as a “white dwarf” – and leave behind lots of pretty gas and dust, which is called a “planetary nebula”. It will stay like this for billions of years until eventually it stops glowing altogether, and becomes a “black dwarf”.