Although astronomers have a good understanding of the life cycles of stars in general, the specifics of the temperatures stars reach and how long it takes them to transition from one life phase to another are still poorly understood. To get a better picture of overall stellar evolution, data from hundreds of millions of stars observed by Gaia have been collected and analyzed to get a firmer understanding of what we can expect for the future of our own star. The data from Gaia includes the spectra of a huge number of stars, which show how light splits into different wavelengths and which can relate a star’s chemical composition to its temperature. Stars generally stay about the same mass throughout their lifetime, but their size and temperature change significantly at different periods. To understand the fate of our sun, researchers looked at stars that are similar in mass and chemical composition to our sun, but of different ages. This gave them a plot of the possible past and future we could expect our sun to have. “From this work, it becomes clear that our Sun will reach a maximum temperature at an age of about 8 billion years, then cool and increase in size, turning into a red giant star about 10-11 billion years old,” writes European Space Agency. “The sun will reach the end of its life after this phase, when it eventually becomes a dim white dwarf.” ESA also shared this infographic, showing how different types of stars evolve over time: Artist’s impression of some possible evolutionary paths for stars of different initial mass. ESA Detecting sun-like stars is useful in the search for habitable exoplanets, as sun-like stars could host Earth-like planets. It may also help us understand how typical or atypical our solar system is in a galactic context, said one of the researchers, Orlagh Creevey: “If we don’t understand our own sun – and there’s a lot we don’t know about it – how can we expect to understand all the other stars that make up our wonderful galaxy.’
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