Scientists say they have figured out the universe’s ‘death date’, when everything we see in the night sky will disappear forever.
The universe is believed to have originated in a fiery burst 13.8billion years ago, splattering matter throughout space in a moment called the Big Bang.
Dutch scientists believe they know exactly when the universe will die – and it’s a lot sooner than they first thought.
The universe will wind down in 10^78, or a one with 78 zeroes, years, according to a paper released yesterday.
Written out, that’s: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years.
So, fairly far away. Still, this is sooner than the previous death date estimate of 10^1100 years.
Researchers say this is how long it will take for the final white dwarf – dim, dying stars that flicker over hundreds of billions of years – to go out.
Once these celestial embers extinguish, it’s thought they’ll become the rotting remains of stars called black dwarves that don’t emit light.
The remaining bits of the universe will go on sailing apart from one another, drifting in the void of space for billions of lonely, silent years.
Heino Falcke, lead author on the new paper, said: ‘The ultimate end of the universe comes much sooner than expected, but fortunately it still takes a very long time.’
However, it’s not just white dwarves that will signal the ‘end’ of the universe. Other cosmic residents like black holes and neutron stars, the shrunken dense cores of stars that have exploded and died, are ‘evaporating’.
This decay is happening because of Hawking radiation, first proposed by Stephen Hawking in 1975.
Hawking discovered that black holes aren’t ever-growing blobs with gravity so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape them.
Something does manage to flee, though. Hawking radiation, which takes with it part of the black hole’s mass.
Over aeons, as this radiation leaks, the black hole will fizzle out and explode, according to Hawking’s calculations.
By taking this radiation leakage into account, the research team from Radboud University Nijmegen estimates that black holes and neutron stars will ‘evaporate’ in 10^67 years.
Death by Hawking radiation takes a long time. The researchers said it would take 10^90 years for a human and the Moon to evaporate, the paper published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics said.
How could the universe end?
How the universe will end, if it all, is something that has kept scientists up at night for centuries.
Cosmologists say that when matter was coughed out, it gradually developed structure in the forms of shining stars, gluttonous black holes and a little blue marble called Earth.
Most of it has been drifting away from one another, a process called cosmic expansion. It has, however, been slowing down, probably because of the collective gravity of everything in the universe.
Some physicists argue that the universe will keep expanding forever. This doesn’t mean more cosmic real estate options, though.
Galaxies would become so far apart that they might think they’re the only things in the universe. Starved of energy, the now barren universe would become the same temperature – scientists called this the ‘big freeze’.
Other astronomers say the universe will eventually ping back inwards and vanish in a ‘big crunch’.
Or, the universe will keep expanding at such a breakneck pace that it will tear itself apart – the ‘big rip’ – leaving countless lonely particles to whizz around all day in a bunch of nothing.
It’s that or the comically sounding ‘big slurp’, which is anything but funny. The ‘slurp’ is a quantum glitch involving the Higgs particle – an eentsy-teensy-weensy particle that gives the universe mass.
This fluctuation – which could occur at any second – would cause a bubble of vacuum that gobbles everything up.
Life inside the bubble could be a completely new and exotic universe – or nothing at all, because everything has been destroyed.
In other words, the end is coming, yes. But it’s definitely too soon to start freaking out.
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