22 billion years in the future is the earliest possible end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario, assuming a model of dark energy with w = −1.5. False vacuum decay may occur in 20 to 30 billion years if the Higgs field is metastable.
The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction. However, theoretically speaking, there is nothing to conclusively indicate that intergalactic travel is impossible.
Astronomers have determined that our universe is 13.7 billion years old. How exactly did they come to this precise conclusion?
The edge of the observable universe is about 270,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 miles away. If you drive at a steady 65 miles per hour, it will take you 480,000,000,000,000,000 — that's 4.8 × 10¹⁷ — years to get there, or 35 million times the current age of the universe.
The Big Crunch is a hypothetical scenario for the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the expansion of the universe eventually reverses and the universe recollapses, ultimately causing the cosmic scale factor to reach zero, an event potentially followed by a reformation of the universe starting with another Big ...
If dark energy remains unchanging, space will expand indefinitely while increasingly isolated stars will slowly fade away and go cold, a phenomenon referred to as Heat Death. And if dark energy keeps accelerating the expansion of the universe, space itself will eventually be torn apart in the Big Rip.
The known laws of physics suggest that by about 10100 (the No. 1 followed by 100 zeros) years from now, star birth will cease, galaxies will go dark, and even black holes will evaporate through a process known as Hawking radiation, leaving little more than simple subatomic particles and energy.
It's because the space between any two points — like us and the object we're observing — expands with time. The farthest object we've ever seen has had its light travel towards us for 13.4 billion years; we're seeing it as it was just 407 million years after the Big Bang, or 3% of the Universe's present age.
We can see light from 13.8 billion years ago, although it is not star light – there were no stars then. The furthest light we can see is the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the light left over from the Big Bang, forming at just 380,000 years after our cosmic birth.
The biggest single entity that scientists have identified in the universe is a supercluster of galaxies called the Hercules-Corona Borealis Great Wall. It's so wide that light takes about 10 billion years to move across the entire structure.
Astronomers have discovered what may be the oldest and most distant galaxy ever observed. The galaxy, called HD1, dates from a bit more than 300 million years after the Big Bang that marked the origin of the universe some 13.8 billion years ago, researchers said on Thursday.
The universe will die. Eventually it will become nothing. In roughly a quadrillion years, a last star will give its last twinkle, and black holes will devour everything before they completely evaporate. And in a googol years (that's 10 to the hundredth power, which is a lot), the universe will be empty.
Cosmologists aren't sure if the universe is infinitely big or just extremely large. To measure the universe, astronomers instead look at its curvature. The geometric curve on large scales of the universe tells us about its overall shape. If the universe is perfectly geometrically flat, then it can be infinite.
For most space objects, we use light-years to describe their distance. A light-year is the distance light travels in one Earth year. One light-year is about 6 trillion miles (9 trillion km). That is a 6 with 12 zeros behind it!
The merger will totally alter the night sky over Earth but will likely leave the solar system unharmed, according to NASA. Our sun will be a red giant by the time we merge with Andromeda, engulfing Mercury and Venus and then Earth as it grows to a diameter as large as Earth's current orbit.
Q. Will humans survive the Andromeda collision? A: There is a 1 in 400,000 chance that humans will survive the Andromeda collision.
The most distant object ever seen from Earth may have just been discovered. HD1 is an object estimated to lie around 13.3 billion light years away from our planet, placing it in an era when many chemical elements were yet to form. If confirmed, it is more than two billion light years beyond the current record holder.
The Sun is 93 million miles away, so sunlight takes 8 and 1/3 minutes to get to us. Not much changes about the Sun in so short a time, but it still means that when you look at the Sun, you see it as it was 8 minutes ago.
Using our knowledge of the death rate in the entire Milky Way, the death rate for visible stars works out at about one star every 10,000 years or so. Given that all those stars are closer than 4,000 light-years, it is unlikely – though not impossible – that any of them are already dead.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
A galaxy named HD1 has been crowned the new farthest object in the cosmos. Located some 13.5 billion light-years away, HD1 existed only about 330 million years after the Big Bang.
Astronomers estimate the age of the universe in two ways: (a) by looking for the oldest stars; and (b) by measuring the rate of expansion of the universe and extrapolating back to the Big Bang.
So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical. Some experts argue that it may be a grand cosmic coincidence that the big bang forged a perfectly balanced universe that is just right for our existence.
"There's really no sense of time." At the edge of the observable Universe, there's something else happening, according to Katie Mack, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada. The Universe is expanding from the Big Bang, and that expansion is stretching time too.
"There was actually another universe existing before the present one and the Big Bang merely marked the end of that universe. Evidence of that previous universe can still be observed these days," he said.