Good News: the Universe May Not Be Dying

Reuters ^ | Fri February 20, 2004 | Maggie Fox

[BluSky]

What does a Cosmotologist want with the Hubble telescope anyway?

And besides, I thought the Hubble was turned inward toward earth still looking for a sighting of J Lo and Ben? Or was it Britney and Ben?

. . . oops. Sorry. Cosmologist.

Never mind.

[Tom D.]

"2 Peter 3:10 - But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up."

This is a reference to the time when the sun becomes a nova (note not supernova). This is when our solar system ends; not when the universe ends.

I feel more comfortable with a universe that has sufficient matter to collapse in on itself and go through a "big crunch". Perhaps from that we get another big bang and there is some hope of an eternity.

[DannyTN]

You really think it's just our solar system? It doesn't sound like it to me. But there will be a new heaven and new earth.

2 Peter 10 But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in the which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up. 11 Seeing then that all these things shall be dissolved, what manner of persons ought ye to be in all holy conversation and godliness, 12 Looking for and hasting unto the coming of the day of God, wherein the heavens being on fire shall be dissolved, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat? 13 Nevertheless we, according to his promise, look for new heavens and a new earth, wherein dwelleth righteousness.

[ptrey]

What bothers me is if the universe is expanding....where is it going and where does it end? What's on the other side of the end???

SHEESH...Gives me a headache??? TIA if anyone knows.

Best, Will

[Imal]

Just as long as the universe doesn't blow up before I get my tax refund check, I'm okay with it.

[BobS]

"What does a Cosmotologist want with the Hubble telescope anyway?"

Hmmm... this is a very deep question. I will make an attempt.

So that men can analyze back-issues of Cosmopolitan Magazine to determine the point when women went wayward?

[He Rides A White Horse]

Cosmologists had a bit of good news on Friday -- they are just about twice as certain as they were before that the Universe is not going to be ripped apart.

Fifty-Five billion years off........I suppose leftists of the future will be harping about how "Little Green Men Are Hit Hardest"

[StriperSniper]

You really think it's just our solar system? It doesn't sound like it to me.

Doesn't sound like we get away to colonize other star systems, the end is nigh. ;-)

[andy58-in-nh]

It's just pining for the fjords.

Is that a parrot-y or a parrot-dox?

[537 Votes]

Good news for those of us who were planning to live another 10 billion years or so.

Apparently our politicians think they will, because they vote to fund this research.

[David1]

I was exactly going to ask the same question. What is on the other side of the border??????????????????????????? And what ever it is, is there an end to that? If there is, what is on the other side of that other border? Or does it just, whatever it is, continue endlessly with no end? OK, my brain already hurts.

[Monty22]

In the end, I think we'll need either a bunch of expendable type Hubbles or better ones, or moon based telescopes, which would be the absolute best possible solution.

[Billthedrill]

Good news. I calculate that's about an even race between the death of the universe and the Mariners winning a World Series.

[GreenHornet]

Not that this will matter to humans, as it is an estimated 55 billion years off.

It'll be here before you know it.

[Physicist]

I myself am hoping for a "big rip" in our future. The reason is because the rapid expansion looks so much (to me) like the inflationary phase of the early universe that it's tempting to think that cyclic models--and even the "steady-state" models of Hoyle, Bondi, et al.--can be reconciled with open-universe inflationary cosmology. In my imagination, the death of one universe in a violent expansion brings forth the next universe, with every infinitesimal speck of the previous universe becoming a Hubble volume unto itself.

<geek alert>

The one thing that is missing, however, is a mechanism by which to "quench" the expansion.

In inflationary cosmology, the expansion is driven by the existence of a large energy density throughout the vacuum, the existence of which causes gravity to be repulsive, rather than attractive. At some point, however, this "false vacuum" (being only weakly stable) decays down to the true ground state, and the inflation stops.

[Super geek alert: some work suggests that the false vacuum need not be an actual minimum in the vacuum potential. Even if there's only one minimum in the potential, if the vacuum state can get kicked into a high enough state (up onto the steep wall of a paraboloid, say), it can "surf" along for a while, held aloft by the expansion itself, before eventually sliding back down to the single energy minimum.]

In a "big rip", the dark energy density plays the role of the metastable "false vacuum", but there's no way to make it "decay" into free energy...at least, none we know of now.

I had thought of one possible mechanism to quench the expansion, but it won't work. My idea was to consider the vacuum energy density as being analogous to the ground state of the canonical one-dimensional particle-in-a-box, which appears in chapter 2 of every undergraduate quantum mechanics textbook ever written. The important feature is that as the sides of the box are moved farther apart--that is, as the box expands--the wavelength of the ground state gets longer, which is to say, it has a lower energy. Here's the key: if I double the size of the box, the first excited state has exactly the same energy as the former ground state. In other words, it's as if a new ground state has opened up beneath the old ground state, and the particle (in this case, the vacuum) has fallen into it. If this "decay" (by gradual surfing instead of catastrophic collapse, but that's OK) releases enough free energy, it will quench the expansion.

Unfortunately, this analogy is flawed, as Prof. Burt Ovrut pointed out to me. The essential feature of dark energy--or any vacuum energy--is that it is constant per unit volume. It doesn't "dilute" in this fashion as the universe expands, while the free energy does, and this is what enables the dark-energy-driven expansion inexorably to overcome the matter-driven deceleration.

Still, I haven't given up hope. There may be another method of quenching the rip that simply hasn't been thought of, yet. And if that's the case, the universe may, against all odds, be infinite and eternal, and entirely consistent with every detail of the Big Bang theory.

</geek alert>

[ptrey]

David, When I was a kid I used to have a recurring dream...I would be in a desert and on the horizon I'd see a wall...I would walk and walk until I got to the wall, then I'd climb up the wall and look out on the horizon and way in the distance I'd see another wall, Then I'd start walking again, climb up on the next wall and look out over the horizon...way in the distance was another wall. I'd actually wake up tired.

[jwalsh07]

Bummer, I sold short.

[Mad Dawgg]

"Good news for those of us who were planning to live another 10 billion years or so."

Even though he is a total nutjob I am in complete agreement with Woody on this one...

"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work, I want to achieve immortality by not dying!" ---Woody Allen

[PatrickHenry]

In my imagination, the death of one universe in a violent expansion brings forth the next universe, with every infinitesimal speck of the previous universe becoming a Hubble volume unto itself.

Wouldn't that require the inflationary expansion to be a general feature of the universe? It was that way shortly after the Big Bang. But it doesn't now seem (to my limited knowledge) to be a local feature of our region -- only at the limits of what we can see.

Unless these observations worth both ways, and a hypothetical observer at the horizon sees us at his horizon, and he thinks our region of the universe is undergoing such an expansion. But if that's happening all around us, we seem oblivious to it.
</ignoramus mode>

[Bloody Sam Roberts]

I think it's coming into the universe through wormholes....

It's all John Chichton's fault. I'll bet he spilled the beans to that half-breed Scorpius.