How will the Universe end? The Big Freeze..!
If there’s one thing scientists love discussing more than the beginning of the universe, it’s the end. There are literally hundreds of known stellar events that could obliterate the life on our planet before we even knew what hit us. However, the chances of Earth suffering a life-ending global catastrophe are actually rather slim.
But we know that it is coming. At the very least, it will happen when the sun transitions into a red giant.
The end of everything else though, is a little bit more difficult to predict; however, that won’t stop scientists from speculating and theorizing. With this in mind, there are four popular theories on how the universe might end. BIG FREEZE is the latest theory on the end of universe.
The Big Freeze
It is one theory on how the universe will end: the ‘Heat Death’ – also known as the ‘Big Freeze’ or the ‘Big Chill’ – has been suggested as one of the ways in which the cosmos could come to an end, especially since it’s ever expanding.
The idea of heat death actually originates from the second law of thermodynamics – that’s that idea that entropy increases in an isolated system (this system being the universe). Entropy, which is the number of ways in which a system can be arranged, should never decrease, evolving to a state of maximum disorder (or thermodynamic equilibrium). When this happens, all energy will be evenly distributed throughout the cosmos, leaving no room for any reusable energy or heat to burst into existence. Processes that consume energy, which includes our very living on Earth, would cease.
You might think that Heat Death implies some astronomically high temperature that snubs everything out. However British physicist Lord Kelvin, who proposed the idea in the 1850s, referred to the loss of mechanical energy as the theory of heat. In fact, it has been suggested that the more the Universe expands, the cooler it gets.
We’re looking at a continual expansion of the universe, according to readings of the Cosmic Microwave Background, but at a decreasing rate and it look likely that the cosmos will end in a Heat Death. Not to worry though; our universe will continue to produce entropy for a while yet!
Many astronomers and physicists alike believe this may be one of the most probable scenarios thought up at the present moment.
Furthermore, such an event might have already happened before. Some scientists have theorized that the universe we see is the result of a cyclic repetition of the Big Bang, where the first cosmological event came about after the collapse of a previous universe. This is something called Conformal Cyclic Cosmology.
Four theories on end of the universe
There are four important theories which describes the end of the universe. They are,
- The Big Rip
- The Big Freeze
- The Big Crunch
- The Big Slurp
THE BIG RIP:
The Big Rip is a cosmological hypothesis first published in 2003, about the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, is progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future. According to the hypothesis, the scale factor of the universe and with it all distances in the universe will become infinite at a finite time in the future.
THE BIG CRUNCH:
In physical cosmology, the Big Crunch is one possible scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the metric expansion of space eventually reverses and the universe re-collapses, ultimately ending as a black hole singularity or causing a reformation of the universe starting with another big bang.
THE BIG SLURP:
The doomsday scenario that's been refined by the Danish researchers is known as "The Big Slurp." The Big Slurp would occur when there is a radical shift in the forces that govern the Universe. This violent process is called a phase transition and is very similar to what happens when, for example, water turns to steam
No comments:
Post a Comment