Many people have seen images of the Sun as a red giant, baking the Earth to a cinder many billions of years from now. However, what you don't often see are images which show the Sun at an intermediate stage in its life — the subgiant phase. At this point in time, about 6 billion years from now, the Sun will be about two or three times larger than the star we know, and many times brighter. The Earth, shown in this image, will be long dead by then.