DAY & NIGHT on Earth in the Next 10 Billion Years

In the far future, the sky above Earth will be drastically changed by two unavoidable forces. By day, the sun will grow brighter and larger, eventually expanding into a red giant that engulfs the inner planets before shedding its outer layers to become a white dwarf. By night, the calm familiar stars will give way to something far more dramatic, as the Milky Way and Andromeda Galaxy collide, stretching and tearing into glowing streams of stars before merging into a single massive galaxy. This is the long, silent evolution of Earth's sky from now to the far edge of time. From the present day until 5 billion years into the future, the sun will remain in the main sequence phase. Its brightness will increase by 10% every 1 billion years. The Andromeda Galaxy and our Milky Way are currently heading toward each other at about 110 km per second and are expected to make their first close pass in about 4 to 5 billion years. Around 5 billion years from now, the sun will have exhausted the hydrogen in its core, leaving the main sequence and entering the red giant stage. It will begin to expand, and at the peak of the red giant phase, its diameter will swell to 250 times its current size, swallowing Mercury, Venus and likely even the Earth. At the same time, the Milky Way and Andromeda will have completed their first close pass, beginning a direct collision that will strip stars from their spiral arms and fling them into intergalactic space. The sun reaches its peak as a red giant, swelling to 250 times its main sequence size. Mercury and then Venus will be As the sun expands, it loses a significant amount of mass through powerful solar winds, which weakens its gravitational pull and causes Earth's orbit to slowly spiral outward, potentially moving it just far enough away to avoid being physically touched by the sun's outer layers. In 8 billion years, the sun has reached the end of its stellar life. Deep within the core, powerful thermal pulses surge outward, sending waves of energy through the star's structure. These eruptions cast off the sun's outer layers of hydrogen and helium into space, forming a glowing planetary nebula stretching across several light-years. you