New research suggest that the Universe may come to an end much sooner than scientists thought.
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The Universe, now about 13.8 billion years old, will come to an end when the stars burn out and all matter and energy disperses. It will be left as a cold, dark void — a “heat death.”
A team of scientists — a black hole expert, a quantum physicist and a mathematician — calculated that date to be an incomprehensible number — a 1 with 1100 zeros. However, their latest research drastically reduces that. If they’re right, the Universe may come to an end much sooner than scientists thought. The new figure, however, is just as incomprehensible — a 1 with 78 zeros.
Why The Universe Will Die Earlier Than Expected
The simple explanation is that the Universe will end sooner than we thought because white dwarfs — the dense, hot remnants of a star’s core judged to be the most persistent celestial bodies — could evaporate in about 10^78 years. That takes into account Hawking radiation, a theory developed by physicist Stephen Hawking in 1975 that theorized that black holes can decay.
Applying that theory to other objects, this new paper from scientists Heino Falcke, Michael Wondrak and Walter van Suijlekom at Radboud University, Nijmegen, the Netherlands, also found that neutron stars (dense remnants of supernovae) and stellar black holes (formed from the collapse of massive stars) take 10^67 years to decay. They also calculated that the moon and humans will evaporate in 10^90 years.
“The ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately, it still takes a very long time,” said Falcke, in a press release.
The ‘Heat Death’ Of The Universe
The Universe is expanding at an increasing pace, driven by a mysterious force called dark energy. “In the far distant future, this accelerating expansion will empty out the cosmos until there’s essentially nothing left,” wrote Dr Katie Mack, author of The End of Everything, for National Geographic last month. “Stars burn out, matter decays, black holes evaporate, and eventually nothing is left but a few stray particles of light diffusing away the waste heat of all creation.” What happens to the Universe depends on the balance between matter and dark energy.
That’s the classic heat death theory of the end of the Universe when it becomes so cold and lacking in energy that no further processes can occur. However, as Mack says in her book, there are some other ways it could end:
- Big Crunch: The Universe collapses in on itself due to gravity.
- Big Rip: The Universe expands at an accelerating rate, tearing itself apart.
- Big Bounce: The Universe collapses and then expands again, potentially in a cyclic process.
- False vacuum decay: A quantum shift in the laws of physics leads to a catastrophic event.
A New ‘Dark Energy Death?’
There could now be a new sixth way. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument at Kitt Peak National Observatory in Arizona is measuring the effect of dark energy, a mysterious force driving the Universe’s accelerating expansion. After three years, it’s studied nearly 15 million galaxies and quasars (super-bright cores at the centers of galaxies) to create the largest-ever 3D map of the Universe. The data hints that dark energy is not constant but evolves.
That challenges the current standard model of cosmology and suggests that the Universe’s future is unpredictable. “If dark energy is constant, the universe will continue to expand at an accelerating rate forever,” said Professor Ofer Lahav (UCL Physics & Astronomy), a DESI collaborator and a member of its Executive Committee, in a press release in March. “If it evolves with time, the fate of the universe is more uncertain.”
Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.
