Hell might not be eternal

[Cyberman]

Well our star won't do that - far too small on its own - so mercy doesn't really apply, at least on those lines. Mind you, all this red giant stuff is a huge retcon anyway, as Atlas recognises. There's no way anyone can get such an interpretation just from reading the text, only by taking what we have discovered independently from any supposedly holy books and plugging that information into them. If we're going to go down that road, I could be equally justified in saying that hell is a black hole, or some future antimatter experiment gone wrong. I'm guessing it's something to do with tribbles.

umm, I think it might do that ,stimbo. The link says that the sun will expand into a red giant & absorb the surrounding planets..sun's size is perfect to fit a possibility of turning into a red giant.

Except it won't; supernova, that is. Our Sun will indeed eventually swell into a red giant and consume the inner planets out to at least as far as Mars. But a red giant is not the same thing as a supernova. The two are not even similar. Islam may be your bag, astronomy's mine.

Supernovae, just for edification, are classified into two types. Type I supernovae - subclassified into a, b and c - occur in close binary systems with a white dwarf star orbiting a less massive main sequence partner. The white dwarf accretes material from its companion and accumulates it into its own mass, compressing the star until it crosses the mass threshold called the Chandrasekhar Limit, about 1.38 times the mass of our Sun. At that point a catastrophic core collapse is initiated and the star explodes, destroying at least itself and often both stars if they are close enough. Type I supernovae can also occur from the merging of two white dwarves, which event pushes the combined mass above the Chandrasekhar Limit.

Type II supernovae happen to main sequence stars of at least eight solar masses once they reach the end of their lives. All stars burn by converting hydrogen into helium. Once they start to run out of this fuel, they undergo a crisis which they resolve, temporarily, by contracting through gravity, raising their core temperatures and allowing the fusion of higher elements. Once the energy thus produced is exhausted, they contract again and so on. Eventually, there is nothing to stop gravity collapsing the outer layers of the star onto the expanding core and - well, bang is an insult by comparison. Stars of at least eight solar masses have enough mass to fuse elements all the way up to iron; whereas our Sun will never get past carbon.

This is all an extreme simplification and I know I've butchered the subject horribly for the sake of that, but either way you look at it our Sun will never have anough mass by itself to supernova. In fact, after its red giant phase, it will blow off its outer layers and look like this:



but we'll be long gone, one way or another.