Red Dwarfs Are Super Stars

The last real star in the universe will be a red dwarf. This will not be for some time yet. The conditions are ripe for stars to be formed, to live out their lives, to burn out or explode, in cycles for the next 100 trillion years. The universe is, then, unimaginably young, as far as things go, at just 13.8 billion years. If the lifespan of the so-called Stelliferous Era were a single 24-hour day, we'd be nearly 12 seconds in. But one day, all that stellar fuel will be used up, distributed, converted from delicious and powerful hydrogen to more complex elements useless for star formation. The day will come when no new stars are being born, and the ones that exist will start to go out, one by one, forever. Of the hydrogen-burning stars, red dwarfs will hang on the longest. G-type main-sequence stars like our Sun get a few billion years before they exhaust their fuel. Red dwarfs possess a lifespan of about 10 trillion years. We think. It's all theoretical, since we have yet to actually observe the death of a red dwarf star, because—again—the universe hasn't existed nearly long enough for any of them to die.

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