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A Snapshot of the Universe 3 Trillion Years From Now
ultracool wrote with a link to a Science Daily article that requires that you think long term. Really long term. Case Western Reserve University physicists are theorizing that trillions of years from now the universe will become 'static'. Essentially, the information that we use to gauge our Galaxy's position in the universe will have moved beyond the 'visible horizon. "What remains will be 'an island universe' made from the Milky Way and its nearby galactic Local Group neighbors in an overwhelmingly dark void ... The researchers followed up that discussion with one tracking early elements like helium and deuterium produced in the Big Bang. They predict systems that allow us to detect primordial deuterium will be dispersed throughout the universe to become undetectable, while helium in concentrations of approximately 25 percent at the Big Bang will become indiscernible as stars will produce far more helium in the course of their lives to cloud the origins of the early universe."
For a better look at points along the future timeline of the universe, see here: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/origins/universe.html
I'd be much more interesting if someone had a theory about what the universe looked like before the Big Bang, assuming that isn't a bunch of bullshit too.
Right now, Hindu creation mythology is looking less silly than theoretical astrophysics. I'll be waiting for Kalki to come destroy the universe and start a new cycle before I'll believe any speculation about what will happen in the way, way future, 150X as long away as the speculated age of our universe. That's like making predictions about the 3000th birthday of a 20 year old person.
Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a soportar Si la vida me da palo, yo la voy a espabilar
I believe the summary is misleading. The researchers are not saying it will be a static universe, but that it will appear to be static.
The universe will keep expanding, but we will not be able to tell.
Actually, no; we know this isn't the case because we can still observe the CMB, or Cosmic Microwave Background. When the universe was young it was very hot, and so normal matter was ionized and therefore opaque to EM radiation (ie, light). This cools off in a characteristic way until the temperature becomes cool enough that electrons re-bind to protons and the universe becomes (largely) transparent to light. Since we can see this edge, and we can furthermore measure the expansion rate of the universe (via white dwarfs, stellar clusters, etc), we in fact have pretty solid bounds on the age of the universe. This whole island universe thing (ironically what people first thought of galaxies) amounts to an excercise in seeing when expansion beats out light. Recessional speeds due to expansion can exceed someone's idea of "light speed" because space expands and essentially drags the coordinate system with it. The article basically says that the closest bodies will be outside our light cone in ~3e12 years, and the expanding coordinate system will red-shift it to nothingness to boot. Its nice to have it quantified, but its something that we've known for a long time. Hm, apparently the comments can't parse .
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I repeat in greater detail...
As far as I know, the universe is expanding and the rate of expansion is increasing. IIRC, this will result in a situation with a shrinking event horizon, where the universe basically ceases to exist as space-time tears itself apart, and once the event horzon is less than the Planck Length, the universe itself ceases to exist. According to one study which, IIRC, has not been refuted, this will happen in some 20 billion years time. It's called the Big Rip.
So, from what I can gather, any speculation beyond 20 billion years is a waste of time.
RS
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This is a related video. From Google Video website
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... all incompatible--reached its schizophrenic impasse: one theory, known as general relativity, is fantastically successful in describing big things like stars and galaxies, and another, called quantum mechanics, is equally successful in describing small things like atoms and subatomic particles. Albert Einstein, the inventor of general relativity, dreamed of finding a single theory that would embrace all of nature's laws. But in this quest for the so-called unified theory, Einstein came up empty-handed, and the conflict between general relativity and quantum mechanics has stymied all who've followed. That is, until the discovery of string theory."
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=425804139
"Einstein's Dream," introduces string theory and shows how modern physics--being composed of two theories that are ferociously
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The radiation in question is the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation, or CMBR. The CMBR is (analogously speaking) an "echo" of the Big Bang, in the form of electromagnetic radiation. As space expanded, the radiation's wavelength expanded with it, slowly lengthening from the Gamma and X-ray spectrums, through visible light, to the microwave spectrum (where it is now). As space continues to expand, so will the wavelength of the Cosmic Background Radiation.
As an interesting side note, since analog TV operates in the same part of the radio and microwave spectrum that the CMBR is observed, if you tune an analog TV to a blank channel (static), about one percent of that static is the CMBR. Turn the TV on, and watch the Big Bang!
From what I understand of it:
Draw a sinewave on the surface a balloon. It has a set wavelength, right?
Now inflate the balloon to double it's previous size. The wavelength's longer now.
Same thing with the universe, except it's in 3D and in a trillion-year timeframe.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
No! The CMB only tells us what was happening after photons decoupled from charged particles. Even if we had efficient neutrino spectrometers, we would only be able to trace expansion back to neutrinos decoupling from the quark plasma. What happened before that would still be wide open.
And it might well have been exceedingly strange by modern standards. If you extrapolate expansion backwards from the quark plasma, general relativity says that the geometry of space becomes a foam. Does such a foam undergo sudden changes between many phases as it "cools"? Is the fantastic complexity of the space foam equivalent to a flatter space with a larger number of dimensions? Does the foam form meta-stable crystals that only rarely suffer a thermal dislocation, which expands to form a universe like ours at the site of the dislodged bubble, in the process cooling the surrounding foam so that subsequent universe births become less likely? Did the arrow of causality have more than two choices before our universe condensed?
We don't even have the math to analyze lightly-whipped space, let alone a full fledged foam with 256-element tensors that vary sharply on the Planck scale. Making pronouncements about how that state evolved is unwarranted. Even using words like "evolved" is unwarranted when time may have been all loopy.
The term you're looking for is red giant. Red dwarfs are just regular stars even smaller than our own, and the name comes from their reddish spectra.
I'm sorry, c and the Planck length say "no." In fact they say "not no, but HELL NO." Improving optical telescopes and using neat tricks to infer dark matter's presence from visible effects are both examples of doing something that's fairly hard, which is quite different from doing something that's impossible.
As the cosmic expansion accelerates, the light cone that defines our universe will shrink. Anything that was beyond it will no longer be part of our universe. You're not talking about seeing stuff that's really far away anymore -- it's not far away, it's gone forever!
The expansion of space is driven by some mysterious force known as the cosmic coefficient. It's weak. Really weak. You might have thought that gravity was weak, but it's the Hulk compared to this mysterious force.
As a result, space is expanding *between* the galaxies where gravity can't overcome this mysterious force. Within galaxies (and our local group), gravity is quite enough to overwhelm it. Thus our little corner of the universe will remain bound by gravity, but the space between the large clusters will expand at an increasing rate.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
Go read your bible some more. Actual science is probably a little too scary for you.