In 800 million years – the earth will be suffocated and fried
The sun is the earth’s worst enemy. The burning of our star gradually increases over the next hundreds of millions of years so that the Earth ends up like a buff on a frying pan, slowly turning up the heat on the stove.
Life will likely die out in stages over hundreds of millions of years. The best calculations show that Earth’s temperature will threaten larger animals in 600 million years. 200 million years later, microbes will also be wiped out.
The reason is not only the heat of the sun, but also the fact that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere disappears. This happens when volcanic eruptions fail to maintain the level of carbon dioxide. Without it, algae and plants cannot survive. It happens that almost all carbon dioxide will be bound in rock and all plants will then be dead.
After 3.75 billion years – The Milky Way swallowed by a greedy neighbor.
Our nebula will be swallowed up by the neighboring Andromeda nebula in 3.75 billion years. The two nebulae are already on a collision course and approaching each other at a speed of about 200 km/sec.
Andromeda, with its billion stars, will absorb about 300 billion stars of the Milky Way. In this process, however, stars and planets will hardly collide, but will just acquire a new address in space. Our solar system thus ends up three times further from the center of this new nebula than it is today.
After 100 billion years – Dark energy pulls the nebulae apart.
In 100 billion years, most other nebulae besides ours will have disappeared from view. A telescope peering out of our nebula cluster at that time will detect nothing but pitch blackness.
This phenomenon is caused by a mysterious dark energy that causes the universe to expand ever faster. This tremendous acceleration of the universe means that the distances to nebulae that lie far from us will at some point increase, ending up at speeds greater than the speed of light.
When that happens, the light from these nebulae can no longer reach us and we can no longer see distant places in space.
However, this expansion cannot tear nearby nebulae out over the so-called event horizon, where the light disappears. Neighboring nebulae are held in place and drawn in by each other due to the force of gravity, which is strongest over shorter distances.
After 1,000,000 billion years – planets lose their permanent home.
Two stars in a nebula approaching each other can barely distinguish each other’s zoom. But planets around the stars are so light that they can go off their orbits in such a rendezvous.
A star that passes close to another can thus cause a planet to go off its course and end up in the farthest reaches of space.
Scientists have calculated that all planets are blown away like this every 30 billion years. That means that all planets will statistically lose their homes in 1,000,000 billion years.
After a trillion years – Matter ends up as light or iron.
When the energy of all the stars is used up, the material will either become light or iron, according to physicists. This is determined by whether or not the proton – a basic element in all atomic nuclei – decays.
A particle that decays thus becomes a lighter particle. The physics theory of our time – the accepted model – dictates that a proton cannot decay.
If the accepted model is correct, all atoms will end up as iron, which has the most stable atomic nucleus in the universe. But if the protons decay, everything ends up as light.
After more than a decillion years – Black holes evaporate.
The edge of a black hole – the so-called photorecession – is a bottomless hot spot. Once something is captured by a black hole, it cannot escape again. Not even the light itself.
That’s how the theory sounded – until the British physicist Stephen Hawking came up with the so-called Hawking radiation: At the edge of a black hole, a constant stream of particles and antiparticles is formed. The pairs of electrons split and electrons with positive energy escape, while electrons with the corresponding negative energy are sucked into the black hole.
In this way, the black holes constantly lose a little bit of their energy. Over long periods of time, this means that black holes eventually dissolve – the black holes ‘evaporate’.
Five theories about the end times of the universe
- Big Crunch : According to this theory of the end of the universe, gravity will stop its expansion so matter will contract again. All material thus ends up in a monstrous collision, a kind of reversal of the Great Big Bang.
- Big Slurp : If the vacuum is found to be unstable and change its state, the entire universe will likely collapse at the speed of light. It does not shrink like Big Crunch, but collapses.
- Big Bounce : Also referred to as the swing universe. If the universe ends up contracting in a Big Bounce, some physicists predict that another Big Bang will follow. In that case, the universe goes through a cycle and will die and rise again time after time.
- Big Rip : This theory is based on the fact that the universe continues to expand at an ever-increasing rate. Eventually, the expansion will be so great that nebulae and solar systems will be blown apart. Shortly before the end, the atoms will be torn apart.
- Big Freeze : Also referred to as freezing death. According to this theory, the universe dies in an icy state. If the universe expands infinitely, it will cool down to so-called alkal, i.e. -273.15 per centigrade. Then everything will be still and all processes will stop.
