Yo! Who’s ready for my first passion post?!?!
I’ve decided to make this a blog where I take interesting and complicated space facts that I learn and try my best to explain them, as a Musical Theatre major, in the clearest way possible. Despite writing my This I Believe speech on optimism, this post’s topic is going to be a little nihilistic. Today we’ll be talking about the LAST THING that will EVER happen!
Before that, though, we have to address the FIRST thing to ever happen, the Big Bang. Immediately after the universe popped into existence, all there was were swirling clouds of extremely hot hydrogen and helium. This gas formed into massive stars, which quickly burned out and exploded, forming groups of slightly smaller stars from the same gas. This cycle continued as the dying stars passed most of their gas and elements to the next generations. However, with each generation of stars comes more and more red dwarves, smaller and cooler stars that burn very slowly. These red dwarves are selfish, and never give any matter back to the rest of the universe.
When a red dwarf finally dies and turns into a white dwarf, the matter inside of it is locked up forever. It’s the same way with neutron stars and black holes. These three types of matter-hoarders are the reason why the universe will eventually run out of available gas for new stars. You may be thinking, “where are we in this process now?”. Well, approximately 90% of the stars that will ever be born have been born already. The process is moving slowly, though, and the star fuel won’t run until a few trillion years from now. By that point, 88% of the matter in the universe will be white dwarves, with the rest being black holes, neutron stars, and some straggling brown dwarves and gas giants.
White dwarves are typically a million times denser than our sun, much hotter, and not much bigger than earth in size. As they lose their heat, they eventually fade into black dwarves, dense spheres of cold, solid, lightless matter. While this happens, every other object in space will either fall into a black hole or get flung into the cold, dark void. Those supermassive black holes will also eventually sizzle into nothingness by releasing something called Hawking radiation. This will take about 10^100 years, which is a number so big even GOOGOL can’t explain it (get it? 😉
Now let’s do a deep dive into black dwarves, the only objects left in the universe that will actually ever do anything. Black dwarves are the size of earth, as massive as a star, and pretty much as cold as it gets. If you know the physics behind stars, you know that they only stay together because of the heat in their cores, so shouldn’t black dwarves technically just collapse in on themselves? No. Physics is dumb. Instead, the pressure on the matter is so great that electrons can’t attach to nuclei and create atoms, so they form a thick plasma between nuclei, which have been crushed into a rigid lattice structure.
If you’re lost, like I was, I can explain this better through an oversimplified analogy. Imagine you’re on a subway train in Chicago or New York City. When you get on before rush hour, there’s a lot of space on the train and you can afford to sit at least 5 feet away from anyone else. As it crowds up, however, you’ll most likely end up with someone’s ass in your face. Now imagine there’s as many people that would fit in a skyscraper and they’re all on that one train car. At the same time, the subway tunnel walls are closing in against the car like that one scene from Star Wars. That’s basically what happens inside a black dwarf star. The electrons are the poor suffocating people and the walls are gravity, so the whole thing kind of just stays together.
This doesn’t last forever, though, because quantum mechanics loves to mess stuff up. Over extremely large periods of time, adding up to 10^1000 years, something called quantum tunneling will happen and those nuclei that are held in place by the electron soup will start to fuse together pair by pair, forming larger elements. Finally, silicon fuses to form nickel-56, which is radioactive and will eventually decay into iron. When this happens, the decay releases positrons, which are anti-matter particles that crash into electrons like Kamikaze fighters, destroying both of them. Now, the train is losing people one by one until there aren’t enough of them to hold back the walls. Finally, gravity wins and the star collapses, exploding into a supernova. These final flashes of dying black dwarves will be the last light that the universe ever sees.
That’s it. Nothing else will ever happen, as far as we know. I hope that was a sufficient explanation of what the end of the universe will look like, because I don’t completely understand it myself. I got most of my facts for this from a Kurzgesagt video, so it’s pretty reliable information. That being said, this is only true if our current understanding of physics is correct, and historically, human science doesn’t have a great track record for being right about things, so our understanding of this will probably change. Either way, it’s literally impossible for our brains to comprehend the amount of time it’ll take for this to happen, so don’t worry! Our little lives will be over long before the last black dwarves die out!
In the mean time, stay curious!
(Here’s the link to the video if you want more details or to see their cute animations: https://youtu.be/FgnjdW-x7mQ?si=Jcpe-ogRQdKOQHzs )
~Asim
Wow! This is extremely well written and super random, but very interesting. It’s impressive that you can take such complicated ideas and compare them to relatable things and make it funny. You seriously have a talent for creative writing and your style is very original. I cannot wait to read more!
I love Kurzgesagt videos! They’re super awesome because they’re educational and easy to understand. They cover some very fascinating topics and it seems like you’ve got something similar to that going!