speel wrote:
The sun won't fade (in theory that is)
When the sun dies, the core becomes weak, the sun expands (consuming the earth with it's flames) and after that it collapses and becomes a black hole.
Nah, our sun isn't big enough to form a black hole. It has to be over the Chahandresekar (sp?) Limit, which is about 1.4 times the size. And many bigger stars go on a crash diet to drop to this limit as they die anyway. Black holes only tend to form with really big stars.
What will happen with the sun is that, in about 10-20 billion years, it will run out of hydrogen in its core and start burning helium. Core temp will fly up and the star will expand and redden, engulfing earth. Then it will shrink to a white dwarf, maybe throwing out a lot of itself into a nebula at the same time. Then it'll cool to a lump of solid diamond and float around forever.
