- Modern Stellar Era (Present – 100 billion years into the future):
- Next 5 billion years: The Sun expands into a red giant, engulfing Mercury and potentially Venus.
- 7 billion years: The Sun sheds its outer layers, forming a planetary nebula, leaving behind a white dwarf.
- 10 billion years: Formation of stars slows significantly in our galaxy due to depletion of gas.
- 50 billion years: Many existing stars have evolved into white dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes.
- 100 billion years: The universe’s expansion makes distant galaxies unreachable and invisible due to the stretching of light.
- Degenerate Era (100 billion – 1 trillion years into the future):
- 120 billion years: The last generation of sun-like stars exhaust their nuclear fuel.
- 200 billion years: Star formation becomes exceedingly rare.
- 500 billion years: White dwarfs cool to become black dwarfs. Collisions between stellar remnants may create occasional novae.
- Era of Black Holes (1 trillion – 10^40 years into the future):
- 1 trillion years: Galaxy clusters lose their definition as member galaxies drift apart.
- 10^20 years: Even the longest-lived stars have exhausted their fuel and decayed into black dwarfs, neutron stars, or black holes.
- 10^40 years: Evaporation of smaller black holes through Hawking radiation. Only supermassive black holes remain.
- Dark Era (Beyond 10^40 years into the future):
- 10^65 years: Proton decay, if it occurs, reduces all ordinary matter to subatomic particles and radiation.
- 10^100 years: Even the largest black holes have evaporated. The universe is a cold, dark, and nearly empty expanse filled with low-energy photons and particles.
- Thermal Death of the Universe:
- Indeterminate future: The universe reaches a state of maximum entropy. No energy gradients remain to sustain motion or life. It’s an era of eternal darkness and cold.
- Speculative Future Events and Theories:
- Big Rip Scenario: If dark energy continues to accelerate the universe’s expansion, it could eventually tear apart all structures, including atoms.
- Big Crunch Possibility: The universe might reverse its expansion, leading to a catastrophic collapse.
- Cyclic Universe Theory: A collapse might be followed by another Big Bang, suggesting an eternal cycle of birth, death, and rebirth of universes.
All images and all text in this blog were created by artificial intelligences