After the Heat Death of the Universe Will Anything Ever Happen Again
Past piecing together an increasing number of clues, cosmologists are getting closer to understanding what the future and ultimate fate of the universe volition be. And I'yard afraid the news is not skillful. Star germination volition stop and blackness holes will take over until they eventually evaporate into nothingness. There could even be a "Big Rip" on the horizon. But for those who don't mind waiting another tenten50 years or so, things may beginning to look up every bit a number of bizarre events could take place.
But before we consider random events in the very far future, let's start with what we know about the past and the present.
The past
The reason we tin investigate the past evolution of the universe is that, in some regards, astronomy is analogous to archaeology. Explicitly: the further we peer away from our dwelling planet, the further dorsum in time we see in to the universe. And when we wait far back in time, nosotros observe that galaxies are closer together than they are at present. Although just one strand of evidence amid many, this ascertainment – coupled with Einstein'southward theory of general relativity – means that the universe started with a Large Bang and has been expanding e'er since.
The present
Late last century, one of the near pressing issues in modern cosmology was to measure the deceleration rate of the universe. Given the amount of mass observed in the cosmos it was thought that information technology might be enough to cause an eventual contraction of the expansion.
Remarkably, two independent teams of scientists found the exact contrary. The universe was not slowing down in its expansion, it was accelerating. This profound discovery lead to the Nobel prize in physics in 2011. Nonetheless, understanding the implications of it remains challenging.
I way to recall about the accelerating universe is that there must be some kind of material (or field) that permeates the universe that exerts a negative pressure (or a repulsive gravity). We call this dark energy.
This may sound a bit far-fetched, but independent experiments have been conducted to corroborate the dispatch of the universe and the being of nighttime free energy. From 2006, I was involved in the WiggleZ Dark Free energy Survey – a scientific experiment to independently confirm the acceleration. Not only did nosotros find that the acceleration is happening, but we provided compelling evidence that the cause of this was dark energy. We observed that dark energy was retarding the growth of massive superclusters of galaxies.
We therefore suggested that dark energy is existent. If the concept of night energy and its repulsive gravitation forcefulness is as well weird, and so an culling to consider is that perhaps our theory of gravitation needs to exist modified. This might be achieved in in a similar way that relativity avant-garde Newtonian gravitation. Either mode, we need new physics to explain it.
The futurity
Before turning to the very distant futurity, I will mention some other relevant survey: GAMA. Using that survey, we constitute that the universe is slowly "dying". Put another way: the peak era of star germination is well backside us, and the universe is already fading.
The more "firsthand" future can exist predicted with some certainty. 5 billion years from now, the sunday will enter its red giant phase. Depressingly, no more than than two more billion years later on that, information technology will consume Earth.
After that, the relative strength of dark free energy and how it might vary over time becomes important. The stronger and faster the repulsive force of night energy is, the more than probable it is that the universe volition experience a Big Rip. Put bluntly: the Big Rip is what happens when the repulsive force of dark energy is able to overcome gravitation (and everything else). Bodies that are gravitationally bound (such every bit our local supercluster, our ain Milky way galaxy, our solar system, and somewhen ourselves) become ripped apart and all that is left is (probably) lonesome patches of vacuum.
The information from the WiggleZ survey and other experiments do not rule out the Big Rip, but push it in to the exceptionally far future (if at all).
Somewhat more than pressing is the heat death of the universe. As the universe carries on expanding, we will no longer exist able to observe galaxies outside our local group (100 meg years from now). Star formation will then terminate in near 1-100 trillion years as the supply of gas needed will be wearied. While there will be some stars effectually, these will run out of fuel in some 120 trillion years. All that is left at that point is stellar remnants: black holes, neutron stars, white dwarfs being the prime examples. One hundred quintillion (ten20) years from at present, well-nigh of these objects will be swallowed up past the supermassive black holes at the center of galaxies.
In this mode, the universe will go darker and quieter until in that location'due south not much going on. What happens adjacent will depend on how fast the thing in the universe decays. It is idea that protons, which brand upwards atoms along with neutrons and electrons, spontaneously decay into subatomic particles if you only expect long enough. The time for all ordinary matter to disappear has been calculated to be 1040 years from now. Across this, merely black holes will remain. And fifty-fifty they volition evaporate away after some 10100 years.
At this point, the universe will be virtually a vacuum. Particles that remain, like electrons and light particles (photons), are then very far autonomously due to the universe'due south expansion and rarely – if at all – collaborate. This is the true expiry of the universe, dubbed the "rut decease".
The idea comes from the second police force of thermodynamics, which states that entropy – a measure of "disorder" or the number of ways a system can be arranged – always increases. Whatever system, including the universe, will eventually evolve into a state of maximum disorder – just like a saccharide cube will always dissolve in a cup of tea but would accept an insanely long time to randomly go back to an orderly cube structure. When all the energy the in the cosmos is uniformly spread out, at that place is no more rut or energy to fuel processes that consume energy, such as life.
Boltzmann Brains and new Big Bangs
All of the higher up seem very bleak to say the least. So I will end this article on a highly speculative, probably wrong, completely untestable, simply more positive, note.
According to the strange rules of breakthrough mechanics, random things can pop up from a vacuum. And it is not but a mathematical quirk: The being of particles all of a sudden coming into existence so disappearing again is seen constantly in particle physics experiments. However, there is no reason why so-called "quantum fluctuations" could not give rising to an entire atom.
There has even been speculation that a "brain", dubbed a Boltzmann encephalon, could be created in this context. The timescale for such a thing to appear? Well, that has been computed at 101050 years.
And a new Large Bang? That could be on the way in some 10101056 years.
This story is published courtesy of The Chat (nether Creative Commons-Attribution/No derivatives).
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