By I. Hansana, Jadetimes News
A scientist has painted a bleak and desolate picture of the universe's eventual demise, describing it as a "sad, lonely, cold" place. Despite the overall darkness and stillness that will characterize the universe's end, there could be rare instances of silent fireworks as stars that were not expected to explode transform into striking supernovas.
This prediction comes from Matt Caplan, a researcher at Illinois State University, whose work has been accepted for publication in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. According to Caplan's research, the universe, in its final stages, will be vastly different from what we know today. By that time, humanity will likely be long extinct, and the cosmos will be a nearly pitch black expanse, filled only with black holes and the remnants of stars that have long since burned out.
"It will be a bit of a sad, lonely, cold place," Caplan stated. However, amidst this darkness, there will be "black dwarfs," the subject of Caplan's recent study. These are the remnants of smaller stars that, unable to explode into supernovas, collapse into white dwarfs. Over trillions of years, these white dwarfs will cool, dim, and eventually freeze solid, becoming black dwarfs that no longer emit light.
Though black dwarfs will cool down and contract into extremely dense masses about the size of Earth but with the mass of the Sun nuclear reactions within them will persist, albeit slowly and at lower temperatures. Over time, these reactions will turn the black dwarfs into iron, eventually triggering supernova explosions.
These supernovae will occur long after the universe has largely faded to black, with black dwarfs lighting up the dark cosmos as some of the last remaining events in the universe. However, this process is still eons away, with the first black dwarf supernova predicted to occur around 10^1100 years from now a time span so vast that saying "trillion" nearly 100 times would still fall short of expressing its magnitude.
Not all black dwarfs will experience this fate. Caplan estimates that only about 1% of the stars existing today approximately a billion trillion will undergo this transformation, with the rest, including our Sun, lacking the necessary mass to trigger a supernova.
The most massive black dwarfs will be the first to explode, followed by smaller ones, until there is nothing left to go off. At that point, the universe will enter a final silence, with no further events ever occurring.
"Black dwarf supernovas might be the last interesting thing to happen in the universe," Caplan noted. "They may be the last supernovas ever." By then, galaxies will have dispersed, black holes will have evaporated, and the expansion of the universe will have stretched all remaining objects so far apart that they will never witness each other’s explosions. It will be impossible for light to travel across such vast distances, leaving the universe in perpetual darkness.
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