I was showing Andrew the Astronomy Picture of the Day today. The picture is of the crab nebula. I was explaining to him that the nebula was formed when a star exploded. This lead to quite a few questions about stars and astronomy type things in general. Eventually we made our way around to talking about our sun.
Andrew: "Is our sun going to explode?"
Me: "Yes, but probably not for something like 10 billion years. Do you understand how big a billion is?"
… long discussion about grains of sand in the sandbox etc…
Andrew: "Wow! That is a long time. Dad, this is sad to say but you are old. Mom is old too, but not as old as you. But I am not that old. So it’s sad to say, but people die when they get really old. And you and mom will be dead before our sun explodes."
Me: "Yes, yes we will."
And for the record, I am only 3 months older than my wife

July 20th, 2006 at 12:09 am
this is really scary to know that the sun is going to explode some day
July 28th, 2006 at 3:09 pm
Andrew is just too smart!