What does the future hold for the universe? Learning about the future from the distant past

 

Our universe came to life almost 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang - a highly energetic fireball from which it expanded. Today, space is filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, including our solar system's home galaxy, the Milky Way. But how exactly did the baby (embryonic or primordial) universe develop and reach its current state, and what does this tell us about our future?

 

Scientists from the SLAC accelerator and Stanford University combined experimental data and theory to understand how the universe formed and what the future holds. Stringy clumps of dark matter (black regions) serve as scaffolds for the construction of cosmic structures made of normal matter (bright regions), which include stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. Figure: S Skillman, YY. Mao, KIPAC/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory
Scientists from the SLAC accelerator and Stanford University combined experimental data and theory to understand how the universe formed and what the future holds. Stringy clumps of dark matter (black regions) serve as scaffolds for the construction of cosmic structures made of normal matter (bright regions), which include stars, galaxies, and galaxy clusters. Figure: S Skillman, YY. Mao, KIPAC/SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

 

Our universe came to life almost 14 billion years ago in the Big Bang - a highly energetic fireball from which it expanded. Today, space is filled with hundreds of billions of galaxies, including our solar system's home galaxy, the Milky Way. But how exactly did the embryonic universe develop and reach its current state, and what does this tell us about our future?

 

These are the basic questions that "atsophysic archaeologists" like Risa Wechsler want to answer. At Stanford University's Cavelli Institute for Particle Astrophysics and Cosmology (KIPAC) and the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Wechsler and her team combined experimental data with theoretical hypotheses in computer simulations that dug deep into cosmic history in an attempt to trace how particles of heavy matter joined together to form larger and larger structures in the universe. pervasive.

 

"Computing is an essential aspect of the collaboration between SLAC and Stanford," says Wexler, a professor of particle physics and astrophysics.

 

Wechsler's simulated journeys through space-time were based on a variety of experimental data, including observations by the Dark Energy Survey (DES), which recently discovered a new series of ultrathin companion galaxies to our Milky Way rich in so-called dark matter. The invisible force that attracts and influences ordinary matter, which plays a decisive role in the processes of formation and growth of galaxies.

 

Dark energy is another key element in shaping the universe: it inflates the universe like a balloon at an ever-increasing rate, but researchers don't know much about what causes the acceleration.

 

Two future projects will give Wechsler and other researchers new clues about the mysterious energy. The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) will begin in 2018 to transform 3,200D images from surveys like DES into a XNUMXD map of the universe. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST), with a sensitive XNUMX megapixel digital eye, would begin a few years later to explore deep space better than any telescope before it.

 

"When we look at distant galaxies we are looking into the past and this allows us to measure how dark energy affects the growth and expansion of galaxies at different points in time," says Wechsler. "Over the last 10 years, we have made great progress in refining our cosmological model, which describes many features of today's universe very well. However, if the data shows that the model is going to break down in the future it will completely change our view of the universe."

The current model suggests that the universe is destined to expand forever, becoming colder and darker faster and faster as galaxies grow farther apart, but is this acceleration a constant or a changing property of space-time? Or would it even be an extension of the theory of gravity on the largest scale? Additional data will help researchers find an answer to these basic questions.

 

to the notice of the researchers

 

Comments

  1. rival
    You made me waste another hour of sleep after midnight listening to Avishai Dekal's interesting lecture.
    Yaniv
    From the first class in high school in physics, the teacher said that if the data measured in the field does not match what is obtained from a certain formula, then the formula should be thrown away and another should be found. It is forbidden to do the opposite and change the data so that they fit the formula, and for those who do not understand, this is exactly what is done with the addition of the dark matter to the general amount of mass in the galaxies. So you want to tell me that what he taught me was a poor thing??, I think it is one of the fundamental things in science, knowing how to replace the formulas, or at least correct them, according to what is measured in the field. There is only reluctance to do such a thing to an elementary formula like Newton's gravitation but that is until she meets a scientist with balls who doesn't care what others, wretched or not, think of his actions. Since I'm an astronomy enthusiast and it's not my profession, so I don't mind not being in the scientific consensus, and I say what I think is right, and if someone thinks my response is lousy - Zebsho, I hope you'll stop using your insulting nicknames. I'm just saying my opinion and you can disagree or not.
    So please respond gently
    Good Day
    Yehuda

  2. Fred Hoyle (thanks for the info). Miracles, maybe we're just too far away to see? They thought that Pluto was the end of our system, and it turned out that there are other celestial bodies there. Maybe more powerful telescopes will bring surprising results. A big bang is seen as something out of nowhere - I'm talking about an entire universe collapsing in on itself.

  3. Assaf Bar
    In the past there was a theory similar to what you propose. Fred Hoyle, the one who coined the phrase "Big Bang" described a state of an infinite universe that is constantly expanding, and in the resulting space new particles are created.
    If the idea was correct - we should have seen old stars even at a great distance, but this is not the case.

  4. Yehuda
    I'm sorry, but your response is poor! Do you really think you understand physics better than those who have studied for years? Your idea, not only a sign explains many observations, it completely contradicts all other physics.

  5. "If the data shows that the model is going to break down in the future it will completely change our view of the universe."
    As Yehuda mentioned, for 80 years we have been searching for dark matter and dark energy, which we have not been able to prove exist, and their entire existence was created to fill the gap in the standard model accepted today. How much is missing exactly?
    For our model to be correct, all the matter we are able to see constitutes 4.6% of the universe, 24% dark matter and 71.4% dark energy.
    That means 95.4% of the universe we have no idea what it is!
    When will the data show that our model does not fit the predictions? When we are left with 0.01% of the universe?
    This reminds me of Einstein's cosmological constant, which was intended to "order the universe" according to the accepted world view of the time, that the universe is static.
    And then they also invent stupid slogans like "we are not afraid to admit that there are things we don't know"...

  6. It seems ridiculous to me that Professor Wechsler bases the future of the universe on dark matter and dark energy - two invented things that have never been proven and in my humble opinion do not exist at all.
    Yehuda

  7. How will it help humanity to know what may/could happen to our universe in billions of years?
    Nothing to waste your time and money on?

  8. Sabdarmish Yehuda, indeed thought-provoking. It's a shame that you don't see more comments - because there are other lines of thought.

  9. to markets
    You are right, the name dark matter is not appropriate, but think about what, in your opinion, should be called a substance whose entire formation is in sin. The gravity in the spiral galaxies was not enough for the rotation of the galaxy and then they invented an illusory substance that they gave the name dark matter which is the one that will create the missing gravity in the galaxies. They have been looking for the particles of this material for eighty years and have found nothing to say the least. From time to time articles are published in which it is as if he was discovered but... Nada, no bears, no forest, and not a particle of forest. So tell Shuki, do you think they don't discover him because he is transparent as you say or maybe they don't discover him because he doesn't exist???
    Good Day
    Please respond gently
    Yehuda

  10. A question that only indirectly belongs to the article: Why is the dark matter called that, when the appropriate name should have been "the transparent matter"? True, it doesn't light up, but neither does the glass in my window.

  11. The universe can be likened to the sun (let's say a beetle gas as an example), our planet is another electron that is part of an atom (the milky way as an example of an atom). From that mighty sun - which eats its fuel and grows at a fast rate - storms in a super nova (the big bang).

  12. Maybe it just seems that the universe is expanding - that is, as the universe shrinks, it seems that vacant places are filling up quickly - in our interpretation this is rapid "expansion".

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