Assuming humans are still here during that time, what exactly will happen to earth when the sun dies?

Question

Will it just become really dark here and cold here? What prevents the earth from moving around and orbiting other stars outside of the sun; after all there's no gravity in space right?

Answer 1

Because of the sun's mass and type it will most likely turn into a red giant destroying the inner planets and eventually burn through the rest of it's fuel and turn into a small white dwarf.

Answer 2

You're anthropomorphizing. Stars don't "die", they just change. The current model has the Sun expanding into a red giant after it exhausts its hydrogen and its internal dynamics change. That would effectively destroy Earth as a separate planet. Should the Earth survive whatever happens, the Sun will eventually exhaust all of its reactive material, cooling to a brown dwarf, but it won't vanish. There will still be matter there, and gravity. Yes, it will be dark and extremely cold. You'd be able to see the stars in the "daytime".

The Earth is not conscious. Even if it was, it could not decide to go somewhere else. The laws of physics determine its orbital path. There is some drifting, as the Sun slowly loses mass and planets pull on each other in passing, but it will be a long time before we can measure the change. If there is a substantial change, such as a near pass of a rogue star or a (near) collision of two planet-size bodies, orbits will change as a result. It's up to gravity and inertia to determine where everything ends up.

Answer 3

Sunlight is the main source of energy to the surface of Earth, The plants captures the energy of sunlight and converts it to chemical form (oxygen and reduced carbon compounds). The temperature is about 2.73 kelven out side, so what is our source of heating?

and yes, there is no gravity, there is the attraction force, its a kind of force that attracts particles toward each other according to their mass, so our attractor is the sun, but why do not we fall in the sun, that's because there is a kind of force called centrifugal force pushing the earth to the opposite direction of the first force. So we can call it such an equilibrium force.

Answer 4

The sun will expand into a red giant and vaporize the earth.

Answer 5

...the Sun will "die" over a long period of time... we'll be long gone before our Sun "implodes"....