I was doing a question out of a physics book and it was to calculate the time for the sun to lose 5% of its mass. The answer I got was a rediculous figure that was like 700 000 times longer than the remaining 8.5 billion years to reach a white dwarf (i'm going from memory here)
Could someone tell me as I have heard from a friend that he believes that over the life of our sun it only loses about 2%mass.
See wiki/Sun .... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun
Section on life cycle.
By the time the Sun becomes a red giant it will have lost 30% of its present mass due to stellar wind.
