From Eternity to Here

by Sean Carroll

The universe will continue to expand, cool off, and become increasingly dilute. Distant galaxies will accelerate away from us, becoming more and more redshifted as they go. Eventually they will fade from view, as the time between photons that could possibly reach us becomes longer and longer. The entirety of the observable universe will just be our local group of gravitationally bound galaxies. Galaxies don’t last forever. The stars in them burn their nuclear fuel and die. Out of the remnant gas and dust more stars can form, but a point of diminishing returns is reached, after which all of the stars in the galaxy are dead. We are left with white dwarfs (stars that once burned, and ran out of fuel), brown dwarfs (stars that never burned in the first place), and neutron stars (stars that used to be white dwarfs but collapsed further under the pull of gravity). These objects may or may not be stable in their own right; our best current theoretical guess is that the protons and neutrons that make them up aren’t perfectly stable themselves but will eventually decay into lighter particles. If that’s true (and admittedly, we’re not sure), the various forms of dead stars will eventually dissipate into a thin gas of particles that disperse into the void. It won’t be quick; a reasonable estimate is 1040 years from now. For comparison, the current universe is about 1010 years old.