Our sun is destined to 'kick and spit' its way across the solar system when it dies

Scientists have discovered that dying stars don't go down without a fight. New research suggests that when stars like the sun enter their red giant phase, they spit out blobs of plasma and receive a corresponding "kick" in the opposite direction. Stars become red giants when the hydrogen in their cores is exhausted, and that core collapses. This results in the outer layers of the star where nuclear fusion is still occurring, puffing out and expanding the star's radius to as much as 100 times its original size. Those outer layers are eventually lost altogether, leaving behind a dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf. The sun itself will undergo this transformation in around 5 billion years, swelling out to around the orbit of Mars and engulfing the inner rocky planets, including Earth. California Institute of Technology researcher Jim Fuller calculated that before a star becomes a white dwarf, it will receive around 10,000 little kicks over the course of hundreds of thousands of years. The cause of these kicks is the ejection of blobs of plasma from the red giant stars. "In this model, blobs of matter are chaotically being ejected from the surface of the bloated stars in an asymmetric fashion," Fuller said in a statement . "And every time that happens, the star gets a little kick in the opposite direction. …