Scientists now consider it unlikely the universe has an end – a region where the galaxies stop or where there would be a barrier of some kind marking the end of space.
22 billion years in the future is the earliest possible end of the Universe in the Big Rip scenario, assuming a model of dark energy with w = −1.5. False vacuum decay may occur in 20 to 30 billion years if the Higgs field is metastable.
The fate of the universe may be determined by its density. The preponderance of evidence to date, based on measurements of the rate of expansion and the mass density, favors a universe that will continue to expand indefinitely, resulting in the "Big Freeze" scenario below.
In about 100 trillion years, the last light will go out. The bad news is that the universe is going to die a slow, aching, miserable death. The good news is that we won't be around to see it.
Trillions of years in the future, long after Earth is destroyed, the universe will drift apart until galaxy and star formation ceases. Slowly, stars will fizzle out, turning night skies black. All lingering matter will be gobbled up by black holes until there's nothing left.
Time has no beginning and no end. In some Big Bounce models, the universe only bounces once. In others it goes through an infinite number of bounces, constantly expanding and contracting, like an accordion that never stops playing. All of these scenarios show us what is possible, not necessarily what is true.
As it stands, the universe is the largest object that we are aware of. There is nothing larger, and everything we can smell, hear, taste, touch, or see is a part of it.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
Even though certain features of the universe seem to require the existence of a multiverse, nothing has been directly observed that suggests it actually exists. So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical.
We currently have no evidence that multiverses exists, and everything we can see suggests there is just one universe — our own.
Typically, they shouldn't be able to merge easily. Once black holes get fairly close together in binary pairs, they can settle into fairly stable orbits with each other. The situation changes, however, if they're dancing together in a crowded environment.
Big Freeze, Big Rip, Big Crunch, Bounce or vacuum decay? Steven Strogatz speaks with theoretical cosmologist Katie Mack about the five ways that scientists think the universe could come to an end.
"There was actually another universe existing before the present one and the Big Bang merely marked the end of that universe. Evidence of that previous universe can still be observed these days," he said.
The world as we know it has three dimensions of space—length, width and depth—and one dimension of time. But there's the mind-bending possibility that many more dimensions exist out there. According to string theory, one of the leading physics model of the last half century, the universe operates with 10 dimensions.
Many religious persons, including many scientists, hold that God created the universe and the various processes driving physical and biological evolution and that these processes then resulted in the creation of galaxies, our solar system, and life on Earth.
Because space isn't curved they will never meet or drift away from each other. A flat universe could be infinite: imagine a 2D piece of paper that stretches out forever. But it could also be finite: imagine taking a piece of paper, making a cylinder and joining the ends to make a torus (doughnut) shape.
As a universe, a vast collection of animate and inanimate objects, time is infinite. Even if there was a beginning, and there might be a big bang end, it won't really be an end. The energy left behind will become something else; the end will be a beginning.
Intergalactic distances are roughly a hundred-thousandfold (five orders of magnitude) greater than their interstellar counterparts. The technology required to travel between galaxies is far beyond humanity's present capabilities, and currently only the subject of speculation, hypothesis, and science fiction.
The time it takes for light from objects in space to reach Earth means that when we look at planets, stars and galaxies, we're actually peering back in time.
These explosions generate beams of high-energy radiation, called gamma-ray bursts (GRBs), which are considered by astronomers to be the most powerful thing in the universe. What's more, these GRBs could be killing our chances of ever discovering life on other planets.
Therefore, our universe is called the cosmos.
Beyond the mass limit of a neutron star – about three solar masses – gravity becomes overwhelming and collapses the star even further, creating a black hole. These are perhaps the strangest objects in the Universe because nothing, not even light, can escape from inside a black hole.
Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives.
As time is a fundamental aspect of our reality, we cannot stop it any more than we could stop depth or width. Furthermore, practical time dilation would necessitate such complex engineering and energy requirements that it remains unfeasible.
According to NASA, time travel is possible, just not in the way you might expect. Albert Einstein's theory of relativity says time and motion are relative to each other, and nothing can go faster than the speed of light, which is 186,000 miles per second. Time travel happens through what's called “time dilation.”