Hi,

Although the Sun is pretty special to us, it is a fairly ordinary star. It formed about 4.6 billion years ago from the huge cloud of molecules and dust (out of which formed everything in our solar system). When parts of the cloud collapsed, one area became our solar system and the biggest chunk of material that clumped together became our Sun. It took about 100,000 years of collapsing until it got dense and hot enough for fusion to start at its center.

Eventually, the Sun will run out of hydrogen to burn and it will start to expand and become a red giant. Unfortunately, Mercury, Venus and probably the Earth will be swallowed up by it. During this phase the Sun will be burning the helium it has, but when that runs out (in about 100 million years) it will start to pulse and eventually blow away its outer material and become a white dwarf (about the size of Earth). Over about another trillion years it will cool down until it is the same temperature as most of the Universe, a few degrees above absolute zero.

Luckily, we have about 6 billion years until the Sun runs out of hydrogen and starts to die.

-Christina