Scientists have discovered that dying stars don't go down without a fight. New research suggests that when stars like the sun enter their red giant phase, they spit out blobs of plasma and receive a corresponding "kick" in the opposite direction.
Stars become red giants when the hydrogen in their cores is exhausted, and that core collapses. This results in the outer layers of the star where nuclear fusion is still occurring, puffing out and expanding the star's radius to as much as 100 times its original size. Those outer layers are eventually lost altogether, leaving behind a dense stellar remnant known as a white dwarf. The sun itself will undergo this transformation in around 5 billion years, swelling out to around the orbit of Mars and engulfing the inner rocky planets, including Earth.
