• Question: does the universe ever end?

    Asked by rav33na to Laura, Lily, Mark, Paul, Sarah on 21 Jun 2010 in Categories: . This question was also asked by naila, eleanorbeedles, evierose.
    • Photo: Mark Roberts

      Mark Roberts answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      Erm I think there does come a point where it runs out of matter but I don’t think there is any boundary.

      Though to be honest it’s not something I’ve thought about nor really know about

    • Photo: Lily Asquith

      Lily Asquith answered on 17 Jun 2010:

      We don’t know the answer to this.
      The theory that is most popular amongst people in the know (cosmologists, who are physicists that study the universe) is that the universe will continue to expand, with everything (stars and galxies) getting further and further away from everything else. Then new stars will stop being born and old stars will use up all their energy and die. So the universe will be vast and cold and completely dark. Horrible thought!

      The fate of the universe is unknown because it relies on us knowing lots of things about it that we don’t know! (Wierd things to with the shape of space and dark energy)

      We are like babies when it comes to understanding this stuff.

    • Photo: Laura Maliszewski

      Laura Maliszewski answered on 18 Jun 2010:

      I think that’s a better one for the astrophysicists here. My understanding is that the universe is still expanding which I think means both that it was a size and therefore a boundary, but also that we’ll never be able to move fast enough to see or measure the end of it.

    • Photo: Sarah Bardsley

      Sarah Bardsley answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      Eeek. That’s a hard question for a biologist to answer! For hundred of years people have thought about how the universe started and how it will end. What I do know about the Universe is that it could be shaped like a balloon, be flat or have a curve like a bowl and has no edges. It is also expanding and at some point this could slow and stop. The end could come in a massive fireball with the universe collapsing in on its self in a reversal of the big bang. Or the universe could become cold, dark and inhabitable. Either way, this will not happen for millions and millions and millions of years yet!

    • Photo: Paul Roche

      Paul Roche answered on 21 Jun 2010:

      It depends which expert you talk to….!

      In most theories, the Universe has to have some end point, and we usually talk about the “heat death” of the universe – the fact that eventually, as the Universe continues to expand forever (which is what we now believe), stars will be born, live and die – but eventually, there will not be any more raw material to make new stars, so we’ll end up in a time when theer are just old stars, slowly dying as their fuel runs out.

      When these final stars have died, the Universe will be cold and dark (heat death), and still expanding. If there is any life left then, it might be able to harness the power of black holes (which will survive even beyond this age), but life would be pretty miserable, with no stars to see…

      But this heat death will not occur for trillions of years (millions of millions of years), and the Universe has only been around for ~14 billion years now, so that is an almost unimaginable time in the future. And it may be that physics will discover a differnt theory in the future anyway – but for now, that’s what we think.

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