Question: Can magma kill the sun in space?

Kate Salmon answered on 10 Mar 2014:

Hi @Davidsd, I’m not entirely sure I understand what you’re asking here but I’ll try to answer anyway.

First of all magma from volcanic eruptions on earth cannot reach space so they wouldn’t be able to touch the sun!

Secondly, magma cannot ‘kill’ the sun. The sun is basically a ball of extremely hot, steaming magma (30 million degrees Celsius) so it would be very hard to kill with magma with magma! It produces light from burning hydrogen in its core.

The sun will die a natural death in ~5 billion years time when it runs out of hydrogen to burn. At this stage, the outer layers of the sun will begin to expand and will engulf the earth (don’t worry, hopefully we will have evolved to be smart enough to move planets by then!). Eventually this will become a ‘red giant’ after a few million years where it is burning helium instead of hydrogen. When all the helium eventually runs out, the outer layers of the red giant will get blown away and all that will be left will be a small, white core or ‘nucleus’. This is called the ‘white dwarf’ stage- there are lots of these in our solar system and scientists are looking to these to find remnants of ancient planets that used to be like ours.