Yes, of course, this probably does not concern us. We are not sure of anything for the next 50 years, and we have no idea what will happen, what can we say there for many years to come.
But still I wonder how it will be there? How will everything turn into a "copper basin"?
The Universe is a global object that includes time, space and all its contents: galaxies, stars, planets, their moons, all other bodies, all matter, all energy. This huge and wonderful object was once born. Like all good things, the universe also has its end. With the past and the origin of the Universe, scientists seem to have decided. But predictions about the end of the Universe remain a set of theories that produce different results depending on the accepted values of several constants.
Birth and life
The dominant theory of the origin of the universe in modern science is the Big Bang. If we extrapolate the apparent expansion of the Universe, 13.799 ± 0.021 billion years ago all matter was at one point of zero size with infinite density and temperature. Then the expansion began. Few of the subsequent processes are within the full understanding of modern physics.
In picoseconds, elementary particles were generated from the quark-gluon plasma. Subsequently, protons and neutrons were formed from them, which in turn gave nuclei of light isotopes. So far, only nuclei - matter is far from atoms.
After 70 thousand years from the starting point, matter begins to dominate radiation. From about 380 thousand years after the Big Bang, electrons and nuclei form neutral atoms for the first time. Stars don't exist yet. The very first are formed from 550 million years after the Big Bang. Stars gather in galaxies. The latter are formed by gravitational interaction into clusters.
Promotional video:
According to the nebular hypothesis, ≈9 billion years after the Big Bang (or ≈4.6 billion years ago), what would later become the solar system began to form from one cloud of gas and dust. A fragment of the cloud collapsed into a ball in the center, the surrounding parts also collapsed and rotated faster, forming a characteristic disk. Our star lit up from the ball, planets were formed in the cold regions in thickening of matter.
In this brief description, we are interested in the possibility of predicting how long the Sun may still exist. 13.799 billion years after it all began, we have a blue Earth, life, and free pornography over data networks. The order of life convenient for us will exist for a long time, but only by human standards.
In 2.4 billion years from now, the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy will collide. There will be no one to observe this from Earth. Life on our planet will die out in about a billion years - the Sun will provide too much heat, and the oceans will simply evaporate. The star itself will last a long time.
Life cycle of the Sun.
In billions of years, the Sun will already be a red giant that has long used up its reserves of hydrogen fuel. It will expand approximately 250 times. Some studies show that before collapsing into a white dwarf, the Sun will still capture the Earth, as the planet's orbit will sink lower. However, it doesn't matter - in 7.6 billion years, when this happens, there will be nothing alive on our planet. The sun will shine for billions of years more, but much dimmer. It will eventually turn into a black dwarf. In another billion years, the gravity of other stars will take away the remaining planets. The solar system will cease to exist.
In the next hundreds of millions of years, there is no need to worry about the death of the Earth - during this period the solar system is stable. Burning up the fuel of a nearby star billions of years from now is not even a problem. Modern humanity has real tasks that threaten to significantly deteriorate the quality of life. There are many of them: from antibiotics that stop working due to the appearance of superbugs to global climate change due to the release of greenhouse gases. Finally, there is a banal danger of unleashing a thermonuclear war or destroying ourselves in some other way.
Perhaps our descendants will shift the Earth's orbit or even migrate from it. Perhaps the Earth will survive this process without unnecessary help. But what problems will the posthumanity face, which will leave the "cradle of civilization"? What awaits other, extraterrestrial life forms? The question of the ultimate fate of the Universe stands at the border of modern cosmological science.
Compression
The universe is expanding, galaxies are scattering from each other. Perhaps the expansion rate will slow down, reach zero, and then go in the opposite direction. The universe can begin to shrink, gradually collapsing into black holes. And these black holes will merge into one. This hypothesis is called "Big Compression".
In Hubble's law, the expansion state of the Universe is determined by its density. If the density is below critical, then the universe will continue to increase in size and cool. If the density of the Universe is higher, then the gravitational force will gradually stop the scattering and direct it backwards. The universe will shrink.
The collapse will be different from the original expansion. Huge clusters of galaxies will converge, then entire galaxies will begin to merge. At some point, the stars will come so close to each other that it will come to frequent collisions. The stars will not be able to dissipate the generated heat and will begin to explode, leaving a hot, inhomogeneous gas. Due to the rising temperature, its atoms will decay into elementary particles, which will be absorbed by coalescing black holes. The hypothesis does not indicate what the ending will be.
There is another continuation hypothesis - the Big Bounce. The simple wording says that the Universe is experiencing Big Bang and Big Compression cycles. Perhaps this Universe arose as a result of the collapse of the previous one. This means that we live at one of the points of an endless cycle of contractions and explosions. However, their numbering does not make sense due to the passage of the singularity point. Some theories claim that the Great Compression will result in the same state that started it all. Another Big Bang will happen. The cycle will continue indefinitely.
But the latest experimental observations of distant supernovae as objects of standard luminosity and the compilation of a relic radiation map show that the expansion does not slow down, but only accelerates.
Expansion
The Great Rip suggests that sometime in the future, all matter in the universe, stars and galaxies, subatomic particles, space and time itself will be torn apart by the rate of expansion. The scenario of this death says that 60 million years before the final, the Milky Way will disintegrate, and the work of the solar system will be disrupted in three months. Half an hour before the Big Rip, the Earth (or a similar planet) will collapse, in one nanosecond, atoms will begin to collapse. According to the hypothesis, all this will happen only after 22 billion years, after the extinction of the Sun into a white dwarf.
However, the most popular theory remains constant expansion and the resulting Heat Death.
In billions of years, the stars will burn out. White dwarfs, neutron stars and black holes will be born from their remains. In 150 billion years from the current moment, with the same acceleration of galaxy recession, all galaxies outside the Local Group will go beyond the cosmological horizon. Events in the Local Group will not be able to influence events in distant galaxies in any way, and vice versa. When observing a distant galaxy, time will slow down and then simply stop. In other words, after 150 billion years, an observer in the Local Group will never see events in distant galaxies. No more flights to them, or any form of communication will be possible.
After 800 billion years, the luminosity of the Local Group will noticeably decrease. Aging stars will give out less and less light, red dwarfs will die out into white ones. In 2 trillion years from now, due to redshift, distant galaxies will be impossible to detect in any way: even the wavelengths of their gamma rays will be higher than the size of the observable universe.
In 100 trillion years, the formation of stars will end, their remnants will shine dimly in space. After the last star has gone out, space will occasionally be illuminated by flares of mergers of two white dwarfs. After 1015 years, the planets will either fall on the remnants of their former stars, or go to other bodies. Similarly, in 1019-1020 years, objects will leave the galaxies. A small portion of objects will fall into a supermassive black hole.
Further development depends on whether the proton is stable or not. Some experiments claim that the minimum half-life of a proton is 1034 years. If this is really so, in 1040 years almost only leptons and photons will remain in the Universe. Remnants of stars will disappear, only black holes will remain. Perhaps the process of nucleon death will take longer.
In 10100 years from the current moment, black holes will evaporate by Hawking radiation. Finally, the universe will be almost completely empty. Photons, neutrinos, electrons and positrons will fly in it, occasionally colliding.
If the protons are stable, then after 101500 cold fusion and quantum tunneling, light nuclei will turn into 56Fe iron atoms. Elements heavier than this isotope will decay with the emission of alpha particles. In 101026 years, quantum tunneling will turn large objects into black holes. Perhaps iron stars will turn into neutron stars in 101076 years from now.
There is a possibility that in 10101056 years quantum fluctuations will give rise to a new Big Bang. Although in this vacuum even a rational creature can be born: an approximate estimate of the time of the birth of the Boltzmann brain is once every 101050 years.
There are other, more exotic hypotheses. For example, in 2010, scientists predicted that in five billion years time will end. This event will be difficult to see or somehow predict, it is promised to be sudden. Space may end due to the collapse of a false vacuum into a true one, to a lower energetically state, which, possibly, will entail the complete destruction of objects in the Universe.
All of these hypotheses are designed for the current realities of a simple equation of state for dark energy. As the name suggests, little is known about dark energy. If the inflationary model of the Universe is correct, then in the first moments after the Big Bang, other forms of dark energy existed. Perhaps the equation of state will change. The conclusions that can be drawn from it will change. It is difficult to predict what we will learn about dark energy if it only developed at the end of the last century.
Here is another version of theoretical physicist Joseph Lykken of the National Accelerator Laboratory. Fermi. At the annual conference of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he presented the theory of the death of the entire universe.
The researcher said that the study of the properties of the discovered Higgs boson confirms the hypothesis of the instability of the universe. This means that sooner or later it may completely cease to exist in the form in which we know it.
The blame was the mass of the "God particle", established by the detectors of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) - 126 gigaelectronvolts.
When Peter Higgs predicted the existence of an elementary boson in 1964, its theoretical mass could be in a wide range from 114 to several hundred gigaelectronvolts. But the result obtained turned out to be in that border zone, below which the assumption of the so-called "false" vacuum is allowed.
Simply put, with such properties of an unstable subatomic particle, the vacuum in the Universe may not be as empty as it is commonly thought. If we assume that it actually possesses a certain amount of energy, then with a certain probability a real “empty” vacuum can appear randomly in some region of space.
“At one point, due to quantum fluctuations, a small bubble of vacuum will give rise to an alternative universe,” explains Likken. "Because of its lower energy level, it will expand at the speed of light, absorbing everything around it."
In fact, we are talking about a new Big Bang and the replacement of one generation of the Universe with another. But you shouldn't stock up on salt and matches. First, the "version" of outer space that surrounds us turned out to be stable enough to survive for 13.5 billion years. If a catastrophe breaks out, then it will happen very, very long ago. Secondly, the expansion of a hypothetical bubble will occur with the maximum possible speed, which means that it will not be possible to predict the end of the world, and it will happen unexpectedly and completely invisible to all living things.