At a Glance

A team of astronomers says the sun will become a planetary nebula in its dying days, in about 10 billion years. Before that, the sun will turn into a red giant, eating up Mars and Venus as it expands.

A team of international astronomers says they believe oursun will reach the end of its lifetime in about 10 billion years as a beautiful planetary nebula.

According to research published Monday in the journal Nature Astronomy, in about5 billion years after it burns up all the hydrogen at its core. By that time, it will have extended in size and swallowed up Venus and Mars,and Earth will be long gone.

In fact, the scientists note that Earth will be gone in about a billion years. That's because every billion years or so, the sun becomes 10 percent brighter as it ages. The increased brightnesswill be enough to evaporate our oceans, making lifeon our planet impossible.

After becoming a red giant, the sun will its dying days turn into a planetary nebula, a massive ring of luminous, interstellar gas and dust left behind.

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The scientists came to their conclusion using a new datamodel.

"When a star dies it ejects a mass of gas and dust — known as its envelope — into space. The envelope can be as much as half the star's mass. This reveals the star's core, which by this point in the star's life is running out of fuel, ,"saidProfessor Albert Zijlstra, an author of the paper from the University of Manchester, in a press release.

"It is only then the hot core makes the ejected envelope shine brightly for around 10,000 years — a brief period in astronomy. This is what makes the planetary nebula visible. Some are so bright that they can be seen from extremely large distances measuring tens of millions of light years, where the star itself would have been much too faint to see."

The sun's predicted fate is not uncommon. About 90 percent of stars in the universe become planetary nebula at the end of their lives.

Previously, researchers believed the sun's mass was not great enough to produce a visible nebula as it died out.The astronomers of this study refutethat notion, saying that once the core ejects the envelope of gas and debris, it will heatup three times faster than previously thought. This means it will be able to light up the debris field just enough to be seen.

"We found that stars with mass less than 1.1 times the mass of the sun produce fainter nebula, and stars more massive than 3 solar masses brighter nebulae, but for the rest, the predicted brightness is very close to what had been observed," Zijlstra said.