8/2/2023 0 Comments Last stop cosmos no thanks.![]() Finally, our universe would end in an explosion, a singularity of literally infinite energy.Ĭurrent theories predict that if this so-called Big Rip is in our future, it will take another 22 billion years to arrive. ![]() As the car goes faster and faster - the speed of the velocity change itself increasing over time - the car would eventually fly apart in pieces as friction took its toll.Ī similar thing happens to a universe with relentless acceleration: Galaxies would be destroyed, the solar system would unbind and eventually all the planets would burst asunder as the rapid expansion of space rips apart its very atoms. Imagine a driver who keeps a foot on the gas pedal of a car with no top acceleration. In 2003, Robert Caldwell of Dartmouth College proposed a new theory of the expansion of the universe where the rate of acceleration keeps increasing over time. No one knows what dark energy is, so we can’t be sure how it will behave in the future. And while there are no definite answers yet, those discussions have come up with a few interesting possibilities. It is so dominant (about 69 percent the total content of the entire cosmos) that dark energy quickly became a part of any discussions about the final end of the universe. ![]() Nobody knows what’s driving the acceleration, so cosmologists have dubbed that mystery dark energy. But when cosmologists calculated just how much it’s slowed down, they got a negative result - the expansion of the universe is speeding up! Given all the matter in the cosmos, the force of gravity should be slowing down that expansion. The only way this makes sense is if the universe itself is expanding. For decades, scientists had known that distant galaxies all move away from us, with the farther ones moving the fastest. In the last years of the 20th century, the astrophysical community was stunned to learn that the universe was driving itself apart. It’s a big question all right, but we’ve made surprising headway toward an answer. ![]() When did the universe begin? How did it start? Has the universe always been expanding? (For the record, the answers are: about 13.8 billion years ago, in a high-density state that rapidly expanded called the Big Bang and yes, but not always at the same speed.) But here’s a question they haven’t figured out yet: How’s it all going to end? Cosmology deals with the big questions of the universe, often the same questions that keep philosophers up at night. ![]()
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