Nothing is immortal, all things come to an end… The universe does not escape this category. Within time, the universe will one day become nothing, and everything that has ever existed that we know about will cease to exist.
So why and how will the universe cease to exist? At the moment, there are three main ways that the universe is presumed to end. These include the big rip, heat death, and the big crunch. All of these speculated theories revolve around the fact that the universe is constantly expanding with increasing speed. Nobody knows exactly where the acceleration of the universe is coming from, however, we call it dark energy.
Let’s start out with the Big Rip theory. As mentioned in my last blog, the universe is constantly expanding at a rate stronger than gravity. Gravity manages to hold clusters of galaxies together while the distances between these galactic clusters are increasing, but with the acceleration of the universe, gravity may potentially lose its effect on every minuscule particle in the universe.
This would mean that at first, only large structures like galaxies are torn apart, black holes, stars, and planets will be the next to be torn apart due to gravity not being able to hold them together. In the end, as the universe expands faster than light, atoms would be affected and simply disband. The universe would be filled with particles not being able to come in contact with any other particles in the universe. (This would be loneliness on a whole other level.)
The next and most terrifying theory speculating the end of the universe is heat death. The difference between the big rip and heat death scenario is the theory that during a heat death scenario matter stays intact while over an unimaginably long amount of time it is converted in to radiation while the universe expands forever. Matter (including gas clouds necessary to create stars) will spread throughout the ever-increasing universe disabling future stars to be formed.
This is a large amount of information to wrap your head around, but unfortunately this means that the universe will turn dark… The remaining suns will die, and all that will be left is black holes drifting in space until they too die off due to hawking radiation (the deterioration of black holes over a large amount of time). The universe will truly become nothing. It will vanish entirely.
The final and most uplifting end of our universe is the big crunch. This theory states that the dark energy causing the universe to accelerate will eventually vanish. With the driving force of dark energy no longer in existence, gravity will be the dominating force in the universe and will begin to condense upon itself.
Super massive black holes will devour the entire universe as it condenses on itself to create a single massive black whole containing the entire mass of the universe and eventually destroying itself. Although all of humanity will be destroyed in the process, the big bounce theory states that this has happened an infinite amount of times and will continue happening through an endless cycle of expansion and contraction. (If anyone reading this blog has watched Harry Potter, it would be like a new universe is created through the ashes of the previous universe just like Dumbledore’s Phoenix.)
So which way will the universe end? Unfortunately, heat death appears to be the most likely scenario, however, its truly best to live in the moment and understand that to whomever is reading this blog, the existence of the universe will appear to be never ending.
Never stop Questioning
