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SCIENCE

BY CHRISTOPHER MCFADDEN

Red Giants: 7 hot-to-handle facts about stars in the dying stages of their life

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A red giant is a brilliant giant star with a low or intermediate mass that is in the late stage of a stellar lifecycle.

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"The cosmos is within us. We are made of star stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself."

-Carl sagan

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Depending on where you measure the temperature of a red giant, it can either be colder than the Sun or much hotter.

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A Sun-like star may be able to sustain a habitable zone for several billion years at a distance of about two astronomical units, while it is evolving into a red giant.

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Our own Sun will enter the red giant phase in about five billion years. Its outer layers will swallow Mercury and Venus and possibly Earth as it expands.

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All red supergiant stars that have been detected so far rotate either slowly or extremely slowly, it can be challenging to tell if the star is spinning at all.

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One of the biggest red giants ever discovered is VY Canis Majoris. This red giant is roughly 1,400 times bigger than our Sun.

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Special red giants are a particular type that is so active and unstable that the rate at which they expel enormous amounts of their own matter.

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The final fate of a red giant depends entirely on the amount of mass it had during its main sequence. It will end its days as a shadow of its former self as a white dwarf.

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