Talk:Supernova/@comment-9801519-20130913182044/@comment-18736543-20140124082952

A solar flare wouldn't do that; a solar prominance could. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/39/Sun_earth_jupiter_whole_600.jpg

But the earth's sun is not massive enough to supernova. What *will* happen is the sun will start to grow, around 4 billion years from now. It'll grow more, and more and more, until this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sun_red_giant.svg

Then it will shrink down to about 1.5x its current size, and do the whole expansion again, and then collapse into less than half its current size.