The death of the universe - Renée Hlozek

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The shape, contents and future of the universe are all intricately related. We know that it's mostly flat; we know that it's made up of baryonic matter (like stars and planets), but mostly dark matter and dark energy; and we know that it's expanding constantly, so that all stars will eventually burn out into a cold nothingness. Renée Hlozek expands on the beauty of this dark ending.

Lesson by Renée Hlozek, animation by Giant Animation Studios.

Looking up at the night sky,

we are amazed by how it seems to go on forever.

But what will the sky look like

billions of years from now?

A particular type of scientist,

called a cosmologist,

spends her time thinking about that very question.

The end of the universe is intimately linked

to what the universe contains.

Over 100 years ago,

Einstein developed the Theory of General Relativity,

formed of equations that help us

understand the relationship

between what a universe is made of

and its shape.

It turns out that the universe

could be curved like a ball or sphere.

We call this positively curved or closed.

Or it could be shaped like a saddle.

We call this negatively curved or open.

Or it could be flat.

And that shape determines

how the universe will live and die.

We now know that the universe is very close to flat.

However, the components of the universe

can still affect its eventual fate.

We can predict how the universe

will change with time

if we measure the amounts or energy densities

of the various components in the universe today.

So, what is the universe made of?

The universe contains all the things that we can see,

like stars, gas, and planets.

We call these things ordinary or baryonic matter.

Even though we see them all around us,

the total energy density of these components

is actually very small,

around 5% of the total energy of the universe.

So, now let's talk about what the other 95% is.

Just under 27% of the rest

of the energy density of the universe

is made up of what we call dark matter.

Dark matter is only very weakly interacting with light,

which means it doesn't shine or reflect light

in the way that stars and planets do,

but, in every other way,

it behaves like ordinary matter --

it attracts things gravitationally.

In fact, the only way we can detect this dark matter

is through this gravitational interaction,

how things orbit around it

and how it bends light

as it curves the space around it.

We have yet to discover a dark matter particle,

but scientists all over the world are searching

for this elusive particle or particles

and the effects of dark matter on the universe.

But this still doesn't add up to 100%.

The remaining 68%

of the energy density of the universe

is made up of dark energy,

which is even more mysterious than dark matter.

This dark energy doesn't behave

like any other substance we know at all

and acts more like anti-gravity force.

We say that it has a gravitational pressure,

which ordinary matter and dark matter do not.

Instead of pulling the universe together,

as we would expect gravity to do,

the universe appears to be expanding apart

at an ever-increasing rate.

The leading idea for dark energy

is that it is a cosmological constant.

That means it has the strange property

that it expands as the volume of space increases

to keep its energy density constant.

So, as the universe expands

as it is doing right now,

there will be more and more dark energy.

Dark matter and baryonic matter,

on the other hand,

don't expand with the universe

and become more diluted.

Because of this property

of the cosmological constant,

the future universe will be more and more dominated

by dark energy,

becoming colder and colder

and expanding faster and faster.

Eventually, the universe will run out of gas

to form stars,

and the stars themselves will run out of fuel

and burn out,

leaving the universe with only black holes in it.

Given enough time,

even these black holes will evaporate,

leaving a universe that is completely cold and empty.

That is what we call the heat death of the universe.

While it might sound depressing

living in a universe

that will end its lifetime cold

and devoid of life,

the end fate of our universe

actually has a beautiful symmetry

to its hot, fiery beginning.

We call the accelerating end state

of the universe a de Sitter phase,

named after the Dutch mathematician

Willem de Sitter.

However, we also believe

that the universe had another phase

of de Sitter expansion

in the earliest times of its life.

We call this early period inflation,

where, shortly after the Big Bang,

the universe expanded extremely fast

for a brief period.

So, the universe will end

in much the same state as it began,

accelerating.

We live at an extraordinary time

in the life of the universe

where we can start to understand

the universe's journey

and view a history

that plays itself out on the sky

for all of us to see.