Spark and Perl go looking
Was the Sun always there?
No. It was born about 4.6 billion years ago,
out of a huge cloud of gas and dust.
How is a star born out of a cloud?
The cloud’s own weight pulls it together, tighter and tighter.
The middle gets so squeezed and so hot that it starts to shine.
It is happening right now in the Orion Nebula.
So stars are still being born.
All the time. The stars of the Pleiades are babies, as stars go.
Does a star last for ever?
Not for ever, but for a very long time.
Our Sun is about halfway through its steady shining. It has billions of years of it still ahead.
How does it end?
Calmly, for a star like ours.
It puffs its outer layers out into a glowing shell, like the Ring Nebula,
and what stays in the middle is a small white star that cools very, very slowly.
When?
In about seven and a half billion years. Nobody alive now will see it.
And the really big stars?
They end with a flash: they blow up.
The gas they throw out makes new stars and new planets. The stuff our Earth is made of was once inside stars like that.
Not the star itself — but its nursery, yes: the Orion Nebula, from December to March, in Orion’s sword, even from a garden.
Binoculars show it well, and a small telescope even better.
Back to the story: The Sun
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