The History of the Universe: From Big Bang to Big Blah

February 20, 2012 | 6 , By Donald Goldsmith

Grafico 1.' Inicia la  Creación del Universo ...según Modelo de la Teoria Standard de la Cosmologia.

Timeline not to scale , [Link to this slide] Illustration by Malcolm Godwin

Grafico 2. Inicia la  Aceleracion de la Expansion del Universo ...según Modelo de la Teoria Standard de la Cosmologia.
Today's universe may not be as rip-roaring as the primordial cosmos, but remains an action-packed place

Timeline not to scale [Link to this slide] Illustration by Malcolm Godwin

Grafico 3. Inician Procesos de desaparicion del Universo  ...según Modelo de la Teoria Standard de la Cosmologia.

After the furies of birth, the mature cosmos now evolves more slowly. Stars will continue to form for as long as another 100 trillion years (about 10,000 times the present age of the universe), which leaves plenty of time for slow-building cosmic phenomena to occur.
Time’s seemingly inexorable march has always provoked interest in, and speculation about, the far future of the cosmos. The usual picture is grim.

Five billion years from now the sun will puff itself into a red giant star and swallow the inner solar system before slowly fading to black. But this temporal frame captures only a tiny portion—in fact, an infinitesimal one—of the entire future. As astronomers look ahead, say, “five hundred and seventy-six thousand million years,” as humorist Douglas Adams did in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, they meet a cosmos replete with myriad slow fades to oblivion.

By then the accelerating expansion of space will have already carried everything outside our galaxy beyond our view, leaving the night sky ever emptier.

Lord Byron captured the prospect of such a celestial wasteland in his 1816 poem “Darkness”: “The bright sun was extinguish’d, and the stars/Did wander darkling in the eternal space.”

In Brief

• Although the grand era of galaxy and star formation is over, the universe remains a vigorous place. In the future stars will gradually shift their appearance as their composition changes. Star and planet systems will fall apart, and celestial objects that now are rare will become common, such as dense balls of helium. In some ways, the universe in the future may be more hospitable to life than it is today.
• Considering the far future of the cosmos is more than inherently interesting. The far distant future provides astrophysicists with an intellectual sandbox, a way for them to grasp the implications of their theories and observations.

Timeline not to scale ,  [Link to this slide] Illustration by Malcolm Godwin