Future History
In the 1970s, the future of an expanding universe was studied by the astrophysicist Jamal Islam and the physicist Freeman Dyson. More recently, the astrophysicists Fred Adams and Gregory Laughlin have divided the past and future history of an expanding universe into five eras. The first, the Primordial Era, is the time in the past just after the Big Bang when stars had not yet formed. The second, the Stelliferous Era, includes the present day and all of the stars and galaxies we see. It is the time during which stars form from collapsing clouds of gas. In the subsequent Degenerate Era, the stars will have burnt out, leaving all stellar-mass objects as stellar remnants—white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes. In the Black Hole Era, white dwarfs, neutron stars, and other smaller astronomical objects have been destroyed by proton decay, leaving only black holes. Finally, in the Dark Era, even black holes have disappeared, leaving only a dilute gas of photons and leptons., pp. xxiv–xxviii.
This future history and the timeline below assume the continued expansion of the universe. If the universe begins to recontract, subsequent events in the timeline may not occur because the Big Crunch, the recontraction of the universe into a hot, dense state similar to that after the Big Bang, will supervene., pp. 190–192;
Read more about this topic: Future Of An Expanding Universe
Famous quotes containing the words future and/or history:
“The future depends entirely on what each of us does every day ... a movement is only people moving.”
—Gloria Steinem (b. 1934)
“There is one great fact, characteristic of this our nineteenth century, a fact which no party dares deny. On the one hand, there have started into life industrial and scientific forces which no epoch of former human history had ever suspected. On the other hand, there exist symptoms of decay, far surpassing the horrors recorded of the latter times of the Roman empire. In our days everything seems pregnant with its contrary.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)