The Far Future of Our Solar System

An anonymous reader writes "Sure, the Universe is expanding, the galaxies are accelerating away from one another, and it's looking more and more like they'll never re-collapse. The timeline of the far future looks pretty grim on large scales. But what's to come of our Solar System: of the Earth, our Moon and our Sun? This tour of the far future of the Solar System, scaling the timescales to the Big Bang being '1 Universe year' ago, puts it all in perspective."

Comments

Starts with a bang

[AdamColley]

Aye, his blog is pretty damn excellent.

http://scienceblogs.com/startswithabang/

Unfortunately after a billion years or so there'll be no humans left to see it, hopefully at some point we'll have moved some of our eggs elsewhere, perhaps with generation ships if Einstein was right and there's no other possibilities...

Re:Starts with a bang

[koan]

Over that time scale genetic drift alone would mean we wouldn't see them as human.

Re:Starts with a bang

[gmuslera]

There have been hominids for 5m years, proper humans for only 200k years, civilization for just 20k years, and in 100 years we invented a lot of things (from nukes to biological agents) that could end mankind any day, while going rampant sabotaging the earth ecosystem... and things keeps accelerating. What make you think that will be humans around in not in 1 billon nor 1 millon, but only 10k years in the future being very generous?

Yes, laying eggs somewhere else could improve the chances, self-sustaining space colonies is the way to try it more than generation ships, if any of them is ever possible. But that don't have a chance to happen with current culture where profit in the present is more important than having a future.

To put an example, an asteroid impacted earth 2 days ago that wasn't detected till that moment, how much you think is "invested" on mapping any potential space threats compared with, i.e. spying on ourselves, bailing out banks or even denying climate change? When the federal government had budget problems one of the first victims was the NASA program to detect space debris (a good example of a surveillance system that worth it), while the pentagon wasted 5.5billons the night before the shutdown (if we are talking about our survival, that was a waste), And always will be an "emergency" that will divert efforts and attention to something else, even if we have to create it. Unless we figure out a practical, safe way to travel (far) into the future (yes, we could done it doing a relativistic speed trip, or some suspended animation process could be developed, but nothing practical and for masses yet) we should not worry about what will happen in a millon years, is just too out of the reach of mankind.

Re:Starts with a bang

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Here you go: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metric_expansion_of_space#What_space_is_the_universe_expanding_into.3F

It's kinda sorta expanding into itself . . .

If you smoke some weed, listen to an old "Yes" album from the 70's and do some whippets, you understand it all and it becomes really clear, but you forget again when the whippets wear off.

Take this with a grain of salt

[TheRealMindChild]

I made an edit a while back in reference to the "4 billion year mark", because it was inaccurate, even via the cite it provides:

"Median point by which the Andromeda Galaxy will have collided with the Milky Way, which will thereafter merge to form a galaxy dubbed "Milkomeda".[46] The Solar System is expected to be relatively unaffected by this collision.[47] "

If you actually look at the citation (originally, the previous one had something to do with collisions of clouds and particles) at http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/hubble/science/milky-way-collide.html, it DOES NOT SAY that it will be "relatively unaffected". To Quote:

"Although the galaxies will plow into each other, stars inside each galaxy are so far apart that they will not collide with other stars during the encounter. However, the stars will be thrown into different orbits around the new galactic center. Simulations show that our solar system will probably be tossed much farther from the galactic core than it is today. To make matters more complicated, M31's small companion, the Triangulum galaxy, M33, will join in the collision and perhaps later merge with the M31/Milky Way pair. There is a small chance that M33 will hit the Milky Way first."

While the sum contents of mass *may* be the same within our solar system, everything will be jumbled pretty good to where it won't even kind of look the same.

Take this timeline with a grain of salt. It is pretty apparent the moderators do little in terms of verification

Hawking radiation

[Max Threshold]

Hasn't it been shown that only the least massive black holes will evaporate from Hawking radiation? The radiation emitted by larger ones is less than the mass/energy they absorb from the CMB, so they will continue growing...

Re:Hawking radiation

[mark_osmd]

That's true right now, the 3K background is higher than the tiny temperature of the black holes. But the background temperature will get lower and lower as the universe expands, eventually it would get lower than the hawking temperature of even the largest black holes. At that point all black holes will be shrinking.

Re:Andromeda

[TrollstonButterbeans]

When the Milky Way and Andromeda "collide" no stars will collide. Star formation will begin a new due to the exchange of interstellar gases and the two galaxies will merge.

So that isn't exact the "end" of anything, just the start of a larger galaxy.