Astronomy Club presents: A World Outside the Globe, a regular column written by Astronomy Club members to explore and introduce universal ideas! Read on for the first installment by Daniel Kim '22.
As media often portrays it, for its inexhaustible potential and inherently amusing nature, the end of the world is an imminent, though distant, truth. Regardless of how fantastical or unreal it may initially appear at first sight, the collective demise of the universe and all of its inhabiting existence is a scientifically endorsed inevitability — what past erudite scholars believed, the eternal and continued existence of this very universe, has become a flawed concept in modern physics where the Big Bang theory and the expansion of the universe is proven to be true (we’ll come back to this later). The real question is not whether the universe will collapse back into that state of non-existence or not; it is of the ‘how’ and ‘when’.
The two most prominent scenarios that attempt to encapsulate the death of the universe are the ‘Big Crunch’ and the ‘Big Freeze’ — indeed, as Robert Frost once said, the world will end in fire or in ice. So how will our beloved universe meet its predestined expiry?
Image Source: HowStuffWorks.com
The Big Crunch theory essentially suggests that the universe will return to its original state and vanish — that is, after the expansion of the universe reaches its pivotal point, it will reverse its current ‘expansionist’ trend and begin to shrink until at last all matter is reduced to a single heated point, like the way Big Bang first started. As the contraction accelerates, Cosmic Background Radiation, scattered remnants of the heat from the primitive universe during the Big Bang, will further be concentrated — hence, the universe becomes increasingly warmer and warmer. In the end, a kind of a gravitational collapse will focus all of the heat at a single singularity. If any life form still persists up until this point, they will see the sky gleaming as bright as the surface of the sun. Some believe that after the formation of the new singularity, another Big Bang will occur from the void, giving birth to another universe, perpetuating the cycle.
However, the Big Crunch scenario is unlikely to happen, according to modern astrophysics. The observation on the concentration of the Cosmic Background Radiation has shown that the expansion of the universe is not slowing down, but accelerating. But this by no means prevents the end from happening — it merely presents another much more likely scenario.
Image Source: fromquarkstoquasars.com
The Big Freeze, also known as the Big Chill, states that the universe will continue to expand, until entropy skyrockets and all atomic particles collapse, leaving no tangible matter in a nullified universe. As the universe expands, the CBR (heat) will continue to spread out evenly throughout its space, eventually decreasing the average temperature of the entire universe all the way down to absolute zero (0K). Another name for the Big Freeze scenario is the Heat Death of the Universe — heat will literally die in this interpretation of the end of the world, along with matter that gains energy from it. The Big Freeze is the most widely supported scenario for the end of the world, for many of our observations agree with its predictions.
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