Six billion years from now, someone looking up at the sky on a summer's day would not see the same bright Sun we now see. In its place would be a tiny orb—a "white dwarf"—shining feebly in a black sky.
Figure 1. Spectacular ejection of material from a dying star forms a planetary nebula and leaves behind a feeble remnant, which will become a white dwarf (visible here in the center of the ring). Although some consider a white dwarf to be a dead star (since nuclear fusion has ceased to provide energy within), it is hardly a quiet corpse. Changes in temperature and pressure within the white dwarf result in vibrational instabilities that resonate throughout the object, resulting in "starquakes." Stellar seismologists have learned much about the structure and composition of white dwarfs by continuously following their activity with a global network of telescopes, collectively known as the "Whole Earth Telescope." Here a high-resolution image of the Ring Nebula (M57) reveals details in the radial patterns sculpted in the gas and dust exhaled by the dying star. Our Sun will undergo a similar transformation in the course of its death throes about 5 billion years from now.
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