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Physics ERT The End of OurUniverse
 This essay attempts to explain how the universe is going toend. Astronomers have varied ideas on how the universe willend. Some say the universe will fly apart forever until thecosmos is cold and dark. Others say that it will stopexpanding, and will implode in on itself in a final Big Crunch.However, discoveries being made have proven one thing: theuniverse is expanding faster and faster all the time. Manyfactors, mostly dark energy, affect the expansion of theuniverse. Dark energy causes an acceleration of theexpansion of the universe, and since dark energy increasesas a function of space, its effects grow, and with it so doesthe speed at which the universe expands.
Madhavi Madala
Explanation of Physics
 
The Milky Way is a massive, twirling pinwheel of 100s of billions of stars but is only oneof the 10s of billions other galaxies in the universe rushing pell-mell away from eachother in the aftermath of the
Big Bang
. Astronomers have diverse ideas on how theuniverse will end. The galaxies may fly apart forever with their glow fading until thecosmos is dark and cold. Maybe the expansion will slow to a halt, reverse direction andsend the stars and galaxies flying back together in a final Big Crunch. With a series of discoveries being made, the answer may have been provided once and for all. There is noBig Crunch, just the expansion of space for essentially eternity.Astronomers have known since the 1920s that the galaxies were flying apart. But recentlytheorists have discovered that the whole cosmos must have been at one point, hotter andsmaller. About 300,000 years after the Big Bang the universe would have been a cloud of hot, dense gas glowing white hot. Because this cosmic glow had nowhere to go, it muststill be there, although so diminished that it took the form of feeble microwaves. Thediscovery of the cosmic-microwave background radiation convinced scientists that theuniverse really had initiated from the Big Bang 15 billion years ago.As the universe expands, the combined gravity from all the matter within it tends to slowdown the expansion of the universe. If the pull by the gravity is strong enough, theexpansion would stop and reverse direction. If it was not, the universe would go onexpanding forever. A way to determine whether or not the gravity is slowing down theexpansion of the universe is to weigh the cosmos by calculating the gravity of all the starsand galaxies in the universe and comparing it to the expansion rate of the universe. If theuniverse is expanding faster than the pull of gravity is slowing it down, then the universewill not end in a
Big Crunch
; it will go on expanding forever. However, to calculate thetotal amount of gravity if very hard as it is unknown exactly how much matter is presentin the universe. Scientists have known since the 1930s that there existed matter other thanthe visible stars and gases. The only possible explanation was that an invisible dark matter held together individual galaxies and also those in clusters and stopped them from flyingoff into space. While inferring the mass of dark matter in and around galaxies is easy, it isunknown whether dark matter fills up other parts of the universe where its effects areimperceptible.Another way to determine whether the expansion of the universe is slowing down and byhow much, known formally as the deceleration parameter, is to compare the speed atwhich the nearby and distant universe is expanding. To do this, the brightness of 
Type 1aSupernovas
, which are so bright that they can be seen all the way across the universe, aremeasured. Since the entire universe expands at the same rate at any given time, moredistant galaxies fly away from the centre of the universe and also the Earth, faster thancloser galaxies. To get the rate of the expansion of the universe, both now and in the past,the distance to these supernovas inferred from their brightness and their speed of recessioninferred by the reddening of their light, a phenomenon known as the Doppler shift, aremeasured. However, the results obtained are not expected. The cosmic expansion should be slowing down depending on how much matter it contains. But the results obtained statethat the expansion is speeding up. Distant supernovas should be brighter than closer ones, but they appear fainter.This acceleration of the expansion of the universe suggests that a powerful antigravityforces the galaxies to fly away from each other although normal gravity tries to pull themtogether. Einstein also discussed antigravity in his General Theory of Relativity. Thistheory suggested that the universe must either be expanding or shrinking. The
cosmological constant
is a force that counters gravity and inflates the universe. Thestrange properties of the cosmological constant propose that the universe slowed down
 
during the early stages of expansion then started to accelerate because
dark energy
growsas a function of space. Since there was not much space in the early universe, the effects of gravity would have suppressed that of dark energy. Now, as the universe has grown toimmense proportions, the growing distance between galaxies has proven the effects of gravity less influential than that of dark energy.With the discovery of a distant supernova which was 50% closer to the centre of theuniverse than any other supernova observed before, scientists can determine its speed of recession from Earth and also infer that this supernova was shining when the expansion of the universe was slowing down. What makes this discovery more convincing is that theincessant search for lumpiness in the cosmic background radiation has proven that dark energy is real. Since the discovery of cosmic-microwave background radiation, scientistshave explored the cosmic afterglow for variations in intensity. Matter is not distributedevenly in the modern universe. Galaxies tend to group together fairly close to each other in clumps known as clusters and superclusters. Scientists have rationalized that thislumpiness must have evolved from original lumpiness in the primitive cloud of matter thatgave rise to the background radiation.After numerous observations and measurements from several satellites and telescopes,scientists have confirmed that the lumps are real and that this primitive lumpiness hascontinued into modern times. It is clear now that galaxies cluster together into enormouslumps that manifest the state of the universe shortly after the Big Bang. Lumps in theyoung universe were areas of warm or coolradiation which usually came in fixed sizes.Information about the premature cosmos can beobtained by observing the typical sizes andtemperatures of these warm and cool regions.From the equations of nuclear physics andmeasurements of the amounts of H
2
, He and Li inthe universe, we can infer that the subatomic particles (electrons, protons and neutrons) amountto around only 4% of the critical density. A further 23% of the matter is dark matter. Dark matter iscomposed of objects that are difficult to detect,such as black holes, brown dwarfs, andintergalactic dust. It also includes particles such asneutrinos, neutralinos and axions. Dark energymakes up the remaining 73% of the matter in theuniverse.Critical density is the average density of matter in the universe that would be needed toeventually stop the expansion of the universe. A universe at exactly the critical density issaid to be flat or Euclidean. When the density of the universe is greater than the criticaldensity, then the expansion will stop and the universe will eventually implode under itsown gravitational pull, the Big Crunch. This is a closed universe scenario. However, whenthe density of the universe is less than critical density, the cosmic expansion will continuefor eternity in an open universe scenario. The average density inferred from all the visiblematter in the universe is about one hundredth of the critical density. However, when theinferred existence of dark matter and dark energy are taken into account, the universeseems almost at critical density and has an overall flattish shape.The flatness of the universe suggests that the theory of inflation is true. The theory saysthat the entire visible universe grew in a bout of turbo-expansion from almost nowhere inalmost no time at all. The consequence of this inflation is that the universe is flat. If this is
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