@The Crazy
Giggidy, giggidy, Gig - gi - dy.
@Zombie 20
This thread is supposed to live.
From Wikipedia
The Universe is defined as the summation of all particles and energy that exist and the space-time in which all events occur. Based on observations of the portion of the Universe that is observable, physicists attempt to describe the whole of space-time, including all matter and energy and events which occur, as a single system corresponding to a mathematical model.
The generally accepted scientific theory which describes the origin and evolution of the Universe is Big Bang cosmology, which describes the expansion of space from an extremely hot and dense state of unknown characteristics. The Universe underwent a rapid period of cosmic inflation that flattened out nearly all initial irregularities in the energy density; thereafter the universe expanded and became steadily cooler and less dense. Minor variations in the distribution of mass resulted in hierarchical segregation of the features that are found in the current universe; such as clusters and superclusters of galaxies. There are more than one hundred billion (10^11) galaxies in the Universe,[1] each containing hundreds of billions of stars, with each star containing about 10^57 atoms of hydrogen.
From Wikipedia
The Big Rip is a cosmological hypothesis about the ultimate fate of the universe, in which the matter of the universe, from stars and galaxies to atoms and subatomic particles, are progressively torn apart by the expansion of the universe at a certain time in the future. Theoretically, the scale factor of the universe becomes infinite at a finite time in the future.
The hypothesis relies crucially on the type of dark energy in the universe. The key value is the equation of state w, the ratio between the dark energy pressure and its energy density. At w < − 1, the universe will eventually be pulled apart. Such energy is called phantom energy, a more extreme form of quintessence.
In a phantom energy dominated universe the "fabric" of the universe expands at an ever increasing rate. However, this implies that the size of the observable universe is continually shrinking; the distance to the edge of the observable universe which is moving away at the speed of light from any point gets ever closer. When the size of the observable universe is smaller than any particular structure, then no interaction between the furthest parts of the structure can occur, neither gravitational nor electromagnetic (nor weak or strong), and they will be ripped apart.
First, the galaxies would be separated from each other. Arguably, this is what is happening right now, with galaxies that move outside the observable universe (approximately 46.5 billion light years away). About 60 million years before the end, gravity would be too weak to hold the Milky Way and other individual galaxies together. Approximately three months before the end, the Solar system will be gravitationally unbound. In the last minutes, stars and planets will be torn apart, and an instant before the end, atoms will be destroyed.
The authors of this hypothesis calculate that the end of the universe as we now know it would be in approximately 50 billion years.
