The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking)

by Katie Mack

We are a species poised between an awareness of our ultimate insignificance and an ability to reach far beyond our mundane lives, into the void, to solve the most fundamental mysteries of the cosmos.

a universe that is not static, that had a distinct beginning, must also, inevitably, have an end.

As galaxies get closer together and merge more frequently, galaxies across the sky will burst with the blue light of new stars, and giant jets of particles and radiation will rip through the intergalactic gas. New planets might be born along with those new stars,

jets. The radiation produced by stars and black holes is even hotter than the final stages of the Big Bang, and when the universe recollapses, all that energy gets condensed too.

gravity isn’t best understood as a force between objects, but rather as the bending of space around anything that has mass.

The universe is frickin’ weird

mind-boggling,

cosmological constant is just one possibility for dark energy. All we really know about dark energy is that it’s something that makes the universe expand faster. Or, more precisely, it has negative pressure.

“By thinking about the end of the universe, just like with its beginning, you can sharpen your own thinking about what you think is happening now, and how to extrapolate.