How will the universe, which has been expanding for over 14 billion years, end?
It is said that the universe has been expanding ever since it was born in the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago, but it is still unknown how the universe will end up, and various theories have been proposed. Kurzgesagt, a channel that explains science with animation, has summarized the hypotheses proposed for the destruction of the universe.
The universe is mainly composed of galaxies, gas, and dark matter.
These forces are composed of the interactions of gravity, electromagnetic force, weak force, and strong force, and they attract each other. It can be said that this gravity is putting a brake on the expansion of the universe.
On the other hand, the existence of dark energy is thought to be the energy that accelerates and expands the universe. The true nature of dark energy, which can be called anti-gravity, is still unknown, but there is a theory that there is an energy state called a 'false vacuum' in outer space, and that the vacuum energy of this false vacuum is dark energy. .
Dark energy is an energy that exists based on calculations, but depending on the power balance between this dark energy and its interactions, the death of the universe can be roughly divided into three patterns.
The first is ' heat death ' or 'big freeze.'
If you put a sugar cube in a cup and then pour tea into it, the sugar will gradually melt and become diluted, and just as it spreads throughout the cup, the matter and energy in the entire universe will also gradually become diluted.
The universe continues to expand at an exponential rate. All stars and galaxies become isolated, and stars die quietly over hundreds of billions of years.
As it is, all the stars and planets will slowly disintegrate and fall apart until there is nothing left. However, the idea that ``the energy of the entire universe is finite'' and ``the entire universe will expand forever'' is the premise, and it is not certain whether it will necessarily die from heat death.
The second theory is '
If dark energy were to become even stronger than all interactions, dark energy would start creating a false vacuum in all sorts of spaces, and suddenly all structures would fall apart.
The expansion of the entire universe accelerates so much that space-time itself is torn apart, resulting in the death of the universe, a rather shocking ending.
The third one is '
Conversely, gravity overcomes dark energy, and the expansion of the entire universe turns into contraction.
All matter and space-time in the universe are shrinking.
The universe will become one big fireball, just like it was right after the Big Bang, and will further converge into one singularity.
The fate of a universe that has converged to a singularity is either to completely disappear, or to expand again and create a new universe. If our universe were to undergo a big crunch, only God knows what would happen.
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