Red giant brightness so common on both types of stars. Red giants are evolved from main-sequence stars with masses in the range from about to around . When a star initially forms from a collapsing molecular cloud in the interstellar medium, it contains primarily hydrogen and helium, with trace amounts of "metals" (in stellar structure, this simply refers to "any" element that is not hydrogen or helium i.e. atomic number greater than 2). These elements are all uniformly mixed throughout the star. The star reaches the main sequence when the core reaches a temperature high enough to begin fusing hydrogen (a few
Red giant in part because as the Sun burns hydrogen, it loses mass causing Earth (and all planets) to orbit farther away. There are also significant uncertainties in calculating the orbits of the planets over the next 5–6.5 billion years, so the fate of Earth is not well understood. At its brightest, the red-giant Sun will be several thousand times more luminous than today but its surface will be at about half the temperature. Red giant A red giant is a luminous giant star of low or intermediate mass (roughly 0.3–8 solar masses ()) in a late phase of stellar evolution. The