Universe has less of a future than previously thought

William Atkins
Monday, 25 January 2010 18:40

Science - Space

However, their estimate is only a tentative measure at the moment. Lineweaver stated, "But I can't tell you how many kilometres you can go on that quarter of a tank yet."

Currently, Lineweaver and Egan are looking into a measurement on how much longer the Universe will be able to support life.

However, they admit that this figure will be difficult to come up with because astronomers are unsure about how much energy was available at the beginning of the Big Bang, the start of our Universe.

The abstract to their paper (“A Larger Estimate of the Entropy of the Universe”) is found on the ArXiv.org website.

The researchers used mass-function measurements from supermassive black holes (SMBHs). They stated, “… we find that SMBHs are the largest contributor to the entropy of the observable universe, contributing at least an order of magnitude more entropy than previously estimated.”

They conclude in the abstract, “We make the first tentative estimate of the entropy of weakly interacting massive particle dark matter within the observable universe …. We highlight several caveats pertaining to these estimates and make recommendations for future work.”

However longer the Universe has left to support life, its end will come about like this analogy by Dr. Lineweaver.

He states, "It's kind of like your coffee cup cooling down ... when your coffee cup reaches the temperature of the room it is in, that's equilibrium…. The stars, which are burning hydrogen, are like the coffee cup - they're hot and slowly cooling down….. The question is, when will it end? ... And all you can say is we are closer to the heat death than we anticipated." [News.com.au]