Name: Precious Mae N. Rabac Section: 11 Stem 10 ( St.

Mark )

THE FATE OF THE UNIVERSE

When the word first got out that the expansion of the universe was accelerating, many astronomers
questioned the results. They felt that the observations must be wrong, or the interpretation must be
flawed. The whole concept was so difficult to believe because it requires significant changes in our
understanding of the way the universe works.

Say you step outside and throw a baseball up into the air. The gravity of Earth begins immediately to
act on the baseball, slowing it down even as it rises into the air. The upward speed of the baseball
slows until it stops at its peak, then gravity's pull causes it to drop down at an ever-increasing speed.
What you can't see is that the baseball also has a tiny gravitational pull that acts upon Earth. Gravity
always acts to pull matter together.

Now consider a spaceship. If launched with enough speed, a spaceship will escape Earth's gravity to
the extent that it will not fall back to the planet. However, it hasn't escaped the pull of Earth entirely.
Though it travels away, the spaceship will be continuously slowed — just not to the point where it
stops.

Gravity always pulls matter together. The baseball moves too slowly
and gets pulled back to Earth. The spaceship moves fast enough to
escape Earth, but it never escapes gravity entirely.

Though space expands from the energy of the Big Bang, the universe's mass generates enough
gravity to eventually stop and reverse the expansion in the Big Crunch scenario (left). In the Big Chill
scenario (right), the universe has too little mass and drifts on forever, slowing but never stopping.
By the early 1990s, astronomers had calculated how much mass was in the universe, and decided on
the Big Chill as the most likely end of the universe. But then dark energy showed up in our
observations.

According to the Big Chill, the universe should be expanding more slowly today than it did in the past,
because gravity has had time to work on slowing the universe down over all these billions of years.
But astronomers found that the universe is moving faster today than it was a billion years ago,
meaning something must be working to speed it up.

This result seems crazy because gravity always pulls and slows — it never pushes. Yet some force
appears to be pushing the universe apart. Astronomers, concluding that we just don't know what this
force is, have attributed it to a mysterious dark energy.
The Big Rip - With dark energy, the fate of the universe might go well beyond the Big Chill. In the
strangest and most speculative scenario, as the universe expands ever faster, all of gravity's work will
be undone. Clusters of galaxies will disband and separate.

Then galaxies themselves will be torn apart. The solar system, stars, planets, and even molecules
and atoms could be shredded by the ever-faster expansion. The universe that was born in a violent
expansion could end with an even more violent expansion called the Big Rip.

So out of the three scenarios for the fate of the universe — re-collapse to a Big Crunch, expand ever
more slowly to a Big Chill, or expand ever faster to a Big Rip — we have managed to narrow the
possibilities down somewhat.

Evidence has ruled out the Big Crunch. The Big Chill is probably the least that will happen. Whether
or not the universe goes all the way to a Big Rip depends on what dark energy really is, and whether
it will stay constant forever or fade away as suddenly as it appears to have arisen. And that we do not
yet know.

No matter which scenario is right, the universe still has at least a few tens of billions of years left —
which leaves us plenty of time to look for the answers.

A Universe that is dominated by its mass will expand for a while, but will be slowed by gravity and
eventually will stop expanding and fall back in onto itself. This case is a "closed" Universe. One
theory is that it implodes all the way back to its starting condition and then starts the expansion all
over -- producing an oscillating Universe.
Robert Frost imagined two possible fates for the Earth in his poem, cosmologists envision two
possible fates for the universe:

Endless expansion
The “Big Crunch”

The evolution of the universe is determined by a struggle between the momentum of expansion and
the pull (or push!) of gravity. The current rate of expansion is measured by the Hubble Constant,
while the strength of gravity depends on the density and pressure of the matter in the universe. If the
pressure of the matter is low, as is the case with most forms of matter we know of, then the fate of the
universe is governed by the density.

If the density of the universe is less than the critical density, then the universe will expand forever, like
the green or blue curves in the graph above. Gravity might slow the expansion rate down over time,
but for densities below the critical density, there isn’t enough gravitational pull from the material to
ever stop or reverse the outward expansion. This is also known as the “Big Chill” or “Big Freeze”
because the universe will slowly cool as it expands until eventually it is unable to sustain any life.

If the density of the universe is greater than the critical density, then gravity will eventually win and the
universe will collapse back on itself, the so called “Big Crunch”, like the graph's orange curve. In this
universe, there is sufficient mass in the universe to slow the expansion to a stop, and then eventually
reverse it.
Recent observations of distant supernova have suggested that the expansion of the universe is
actually accelerating or speeding up, like the graph's red curve, which implies the existence of a form
of matter with a strong negative pressure, such as the cosmological constant. This strange form of
matter is also sometimes referred to as the “dark energy”. Unlike gravity which works to slow the
expansion down, dark energy works to speed the expansion up. If dark energy in fact plays a
significant role in the evolution of the universe, then in all likelihood the universe will continue to
expand forever.

There is a growing consensus among cosmologists that the total density of matter is equal to the
critical density, so that the universe is spatially flat. Approximately 24% of this is in the form of a low
pressure matter, most of which is thought to be “non-baryonic” dark matter, while the remaining 71%
is thought to be in the form of a negative pressure “dark energy”, like the cosmological constant. If
this is true, then dark energy is the major driving force behind the fate of the universe and it will
expand forever exponentially.

References: http://hubblesite.org/hubble_discoveries/dark_energy/de-fate_of_the_universe.php\ &

https://wmap.gsfc.nasa.gov/universe/uni_fate.html