"All good things must come to an end." That adage holds true in the cosmos as well as on Earth.
We are aware that stars, like everything else, must die. When they run out of the fuel supply needed for nuclear fusion at their cores, stars of all sizes collapse under their own gravity, dying to form a dense cosmic remnant like a white dwarf, a neutron star, or a black hole. Our own star, the sun, will meet this fate in around 5 billion years, first swelling out as a red giant and obliterating the inner planets, including Earth. After around 1 billion years, this phase, too, will end, leaving the core of the sun as a white dwarf ember surrounded by a cloud of cosmic ashes in the form of cooling stellar material.
