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TIC Tac. TIC Tac. The perpetual clock of the universe continues to tickle the seconds, even at special times like these, when work weeks seem to pass as hours and months are a silent blur.
But just to put things in perspective on the insignificance of our strictly defined daily time blocks, a curious scientist has come up with a formula to predict when cosmic existence will finally abruptly come to a halt and the final supernova will erupt.
Hint: the hypothetical number of years has like a bazillion zeros!
Theoretical physicist Matt Caplan, assistant professor of physics at Illinois State University, admits that humanity will be long gone when this lonely farewell occurs in the incredibly distant, difficult-to-comprehend future – when all heavenly lights turn dark, black holes dominate, and icy stars sparkle forever.
“It will be a bit of a sad, lonely and cold place,” says Caplan. “This is called ‘heat death’, where the universe will be mostly black holes and burnt stars. I became a physicist for a reason. I wanted to think about the big questions – why is the universe here and how is it going to end? ”
In a new research paper published Aug. 7 in the journal Monthly notices from the Royal Astronomical Society, Caplan did some heavy number calculations and tried to figure out how dead stars might pass and evolve over time. In doing so, he came to a rough conclusion as to when this depressing event might fall.
Caplan’s discoveries begin with an educated estimate of how many black iron dwarfs of varying sizes would be needed to trigger an explosion. He figured out that the initial “black dwarf supernova” would explode in about 10 to 1,100 years.
“For years, it’s like saying the word ‘trillion’ almost a hundred times,” he explains. “If you wrote it, it would take most of a page. It’s mind boggling in the future.
“Stars less than about 10 times the mass of the sun don’t have the gravity or density to make iron in their cores like massive stars do, so they can’t explode in a supernova just yet. As the white dwarfs cool down over the next few trillions of years, they will become darker, eventually freeze, and become “ black dwarf ” stars that will no longer glow. Stars shine because of thermonuclear fusion – they are hot enough to break small nuclei together to form larger nuclei, releasing energy. White dwarfs are ash, they are burnt, but fusion reactions can still occur because of the quantum tunnel, but much more slowly. ”
Caplan postulates that the most gigantic black dwarfs will appear first, then a decreasing number of tinier stars until none remain, which he estimates will be in about 10 ^ 32,000 years. . It’s a string of wacky zeros!
“It’s hard to imagine anything after this,” he said. “The black dwarf supernova could be the last interesting thing to happen in the universe. It could be the last supernova ever. The galaxies will have dispersed, the black holes will have evaporated and the expansion of the universe will have evaporated. The universe will have removed all remaining objects. none of the others will ever see explode. It will not even be physically possible for light to travel that far. ”
They say all good things must come to an end, and apparently it’s no different for our universe as well. Now make your last years extraordinary!
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