How Long will the Universe Last?
According to contemporary cosmologists’ best guesses, the universe will continue to last for an extremely long time, something over a googleplex years. A googleplex is a very large number – one followed by a thousand zeroes. Some estimates are even larger. The question of how long the universe will last is related to the question of how long the human species, or our descendants, will last, barring some disaster that wipes us all out prematurely. It is known that the universe is expanding, but a frequent question is whether or not this expansion will continue indefinitely. Current signs indicate that not only is expansion occurring, but it is happening at an accelerating rate. This can be blamed on a universe-wide positive pressure, referred to as dark energy, the cosmological constant, or quintessence. The notion of a cosmological constant was first formulated by Einstein. Prognostications regarding the lifespan of the universe are traditionally associated with its overall geometry. I
A colorful, graphically rich chart that illustrates and summarizes what is now known about the history and fate of the universe has been developed by scientists at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in collaboration with the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP). More than 11,000 copies of this chart are being distributed this month through The Physics Teacher magazine to high school science teachers across the nation for field-testing with their students. “I congratulate the physicists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory who collaborated to produce this thoughtful, thorough and very engaging educational resource,” said Dr. Raymond L. Orbach, Director of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science, which oversees and funds DOE’s national laboratories. “The History and Fate of the Universe poster is a wonderful example of the contributions that researchers at our national laboratories can make to science education for America’s teachers and stude
Tens if not hundreds of billions of years. Our sun? About five billion years before it runs out of its hydrogen fuel and swells up into a bloated red giant star, huge enough to swallow the earth. And Homo sapiens? No life on earth has lasted five billion years. The first of the genus Homo appeared on earth about four million years ago, and already half a dozen species are extinct. Homo habilis, Homo erectus, neanderthalensis, they are all gone. A million years is a fleeting instant compared to the lifetime of the sun, but a very large number indeed in terms of human generations. Yes, even a millennium into the future stretches our imaginations. Think with me for a few minutes about how rapidly our world is changing. My great-grandfathers, who were alive and farming a century ago, would probably have had more rapport with their farmer forebears 900 years earlier than with us today. They had no indoor plumbing, no telephones. When it got dark, they lit kerosene lanterns. They rode in the
At least another 24 billion years, says a team of American scientists that has modelled the fate of the cosmos based on new observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Thanks to information received from NASA’s WMAP probe, an orbiting observatory, scientists have discovered that the age of the universe is 13.7 billion years. They also found that a mysterious force called dark energy is inflating the universe at an accelerating rate. Galaxies are flying apart from each other more quickly than ever before. Observations of supernova, or exploding stars, allowed the scientists to track the rate of cosmic expansion over time. Head researcher Andrei Linde, from Stanford University, revealed the group’s findings in his paper Current Observational Constraints on Cosmic Doomsday. “Our universe most probably will not collapse earlier than 24 billion years, but it will most probably live no longer than 3650 billion years,” he wrote.
A colorful, graphically rich chart that illustrates and summarizes what is now known about the history and fate of the universe has been developed by scientists at the Berkeley Lab in collaboration with the Contemporary Physics Education Project (CPEP). More than 11,000 copies of this chart are being distributed this month through The Physics Teacher magazine to high school science teachers across the nation for field-testing with their students. Full story. View the Universe chart here.
