END OF THE UNIVERSE

Taken from Quantamagazine

HOW WILL THE END OF THE UNIVERSE BE?

Although Kathie Mack, a professor of physics at North Carolina State University (USA) and  Simons Fellow of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Waterloo/Canada), has studied Physics,  over time she has acquired an expanded vision thanks to added knowledge of Astrophysics and Cosmology, which allow her to have a perspective of a  full  universe. from the beginning to the end, on small and large scales, studying their evolution over time, finally being able to predict that  the end of the universe will be preceded by a continuous expansion of the universe where galaxies will  be separated more and more from each other, leaving spaces between them getting bigger, foreseeing a slowing down of stars  and galaxies  formation, generating isolation between galaxies. The local group (Milky Way, Andromeda and others), that we inhabit will stop producing stars, the rest of  them falling into black holes that  will evaporate, leaving as their only trace a cold, empty and dark universe with strange particles and radiation. Shortly, before the extinction of the universe and according to an important group of scientists, a terrific   process called : heath death will occur,  associated to an eternal accelerated expansion  of our universe, while others propose a Big Crunch or  a state of  slow, infinite expansion. At the moment, dark energy and the cosmological constant, keep the possibility of a Big Crunch away, because according to Kathie Mack, the result of the action of gravity that holds galaxies together and the dark energy (produced in certain  high density parts of  dark matter), that separates galaxies, will be one that will favor largely to dark energy, predictions almost confirmed by the discoveries of the Wilkinson Microwave Anysotropy Probe (WMAP/1998), which validated the power of dark energy in processes of separation of  galaxies. Because dark matter does not emit electromagnetic radiation and does not interact with light, this matter appears invisible, and we can pass through it. Inside this matter, electrostatic repulsion processes are carried out between particles, generating dark energy which allow the rotation of galaxies, a feat impossible to be done only by gravity. As dark energy is able to increase its density over time, it is capable of rapidly destroying the universe in a finite time, so dark energy is predicted to overcome the power of gravity that unites galaxies, being able to produce major cosmic damage. Another theoretical proposal of extinction of the Universe is the vacumm decay, for  not  being the universe completely stable, since it is known that laws of physics can change with temperature or environmental energy, the occurrence of particle collisions at high energies,  where  laws of physics are slightly different, just like in the early universe, where after a few transitional processes   emerged  a universe  that possessed electromagnetism, weak and strong nuclear forces and gravity. That is to say,  any cosmic disturbance could alter the physical laws that we know, resulting  that, at the point in space where these changes begin to occur, it will be possible to observe a true vacuum bubble that, when expanding at the speed of light, through the universe, it will destroy instantly and painlessly, everything without violating any fundamental principle of physics. At the moment, the energy  produced by  dark matter is explained by the collision of particles with each other, creating high-energy particles, in areas where dark matter is more concentrated, that energy power being directly proportional to the square of its density (at higher density, more power), being more concentrated in dark matter halos, where large particle collisions occur, in the very center of galaxies. Such halos would have formed the first galaxies, and if heat is produced in the center of them, it would push the gas out of the halos, slowing down after the formation of the first galaxies. Kathie Mack argues that counteracting gravity with dark energy will bring at some point, the end of our universe, annihilating in an instant any vestige of existing intelligent civilization turning everything built by humans into nothing, in a few seconds. If other civilizations exist in the Universe, perhaps they would be interested in maintaining a certain degree of status quo of the universe and its laws so as not to accelerate processes of destruction, so they could be watching the universe. On the other hand, if the entire cosmos died our lives would have made no sense, says Kathie. However, in the face of this almost deterministic extinction of the Universe, there could be another  -albeit minimal  possibility- of migrating to a nascent or already built universes, by means of teleportation processes of our bodies (transformed into particles, to be reconstructed later) or traveling by wormholes or black holes