22. If the Sun explodes, will it affect or wipe out the Milky Way Galaxy? (A K2S Question)

From The Space Library

How our Sun ends its life all depends on the amount of mass or stuff it starts out with. A star like our Sun has too little mass and will never end its life with a catastrophic explosion, but larger stars with much more mass like Betelgeuse, in Orion, may be prime candidates for supernova blasts because of their extreme mass and size. If Betelgeuse were dropped in the position where our Sun is, it would extend all the way out beyond the orbits of Mars and reach the orbit of Jupiter-an astonishing 600 million miles across! Now once you understand that fact, and that the Sun is a small stable star with the next closest star over 4.28 light years away, you can easily see that the Sun will have very little influence over the life of the other 400 billion stars found in our Milky Way Galaxy.

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Answer provided by Jim Zebrowski

Question and Answer extracted from the book Kids to Space - by Lonnie Schorer

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