The “cold death” of the Universe

- Sk Mustafa Kamal

Instrumentation and electronics engineering, UG1

Everyone (almost) knows that the BIG BANG was the birth of the universe and that at some point everything will again become that hot, dense, noisy mess with the BIG CRUNCH. Let me tell you today how astronomically wrong you are!!!

Photo by Vincentiu Solomon on Unsplash

THE BIG BANG: It is the single most beautiful event that took place in all of existence hints of which still are reaching us and the event that threw mass and space all around giving birth to the present-day universe, the event that created time itself and all the laws that we today think are so unbreakable.

Time is a notion, which is entirely based upon entropy, we see objects fall and break and that is natural, and we know the time has passed as few moments before the object was at higher potential energy, less random, and now it has higher randomness. And time itself is going to destroy the universe.

Physicists a few decades back, were dwelling upon an interesting thing, not how it all started but “HOW IT WILL END?” the death of the universe itself, amongst multiple propositions two stood out

Possible deaths of the universe:

• Big crunch

• Cold death

After a few more groundbreaking discoveries about dark matter, which is called dark just because you can’t detect it but the presence of which is only possibly noticed by measuring the visible mass of galaxies namely our own milky way, and how much gravitational force it exerts, and clearly there was way too much force needed to hold milky way together than the mass off all the solar systems combined which meant there was an invisible matter which has gravitation. this further down the line resulted in the conclusion that eventually the gravitational force will be great enough to break the expansion of the universe, and pull it all back together, Thus ruling out “Cold death”.

Now we knew that the universe was still expanding, clearly noticed by the redshift of light from far away stars and that the rate of expansion was exactly the critical value.

Why all were wrong?

• Gravitation was strong but only if its given time

• Existence of a greater force DARK ENERGY

Yes, gravitation can indeed do wonders, but it takes billions of years, “it got billions of years” you might say, but what if I tell it was futile because the universe will never converge again.

DARK ENERGY

Now, this isn’t out of any science fiction novel, it’s just that physicists are really bad at naming stuff but funny too. It has not yet been a decade that a new revelation has been made about the Universe. it is going to cross the critical velocity, and will expand forever until it is literally “stretched thin and cold”.

Dark energy is not very complicated actually, essentially an expansion of the universe means the masses are driving away from each other defying each other’s gravitational pull, but dark energy has been pushing them further, but not actually “Pushing”.

“Dark energy is literally creating new space between masses”

It is not moving the masses away but injecting new space, where does this space come from? How is it made? What is the driving force behind it? WE GOT NO ANSWERS

It becomes even spookier when we realize that this force or rather injecting of new space started long after the big bang. Then what triggered it? We still don’t know and our so little knowledge of this mysterious force is the reason behind its nomenclature.

The only thing we do know is that it is not going to rip you or me apart any time soon, as it is apparently not stronger than the nuclear forces, but definitely stronger than gravitation.

THE COLD DEATH

And thus we arrive at the crossroads once again, the dark energy is going to if not already pushed the expansion of the universe beyond critical velocity, and in a few billion years universe will die a cold death, as the stars die out with the cores turned to iron, every last bit of illumination will drop dark, even quasars will be shredded with space created between them, and ultimately the universe will reach its stable state, a haunting state of no light, 0 K temperature, no movement, a state of complete silence and darkness.

The cold death

That is how the universe is going to die, and along with it dies all its secrets and all that lives.

But do not worry either humans won’t stick around that long, or we are smart species we will figure out something, we always do !!!!