TRENDING SCIENCE: This is when and how the world will end

For centuries, humankind has been pondering how it will all finish. The science community has been theorising the end of the world for almost as long, too. According to a paper published in the journal ‘Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society’, one final set of explosions will spell the universe’s demise. Called black dwarf supernova, these blasts will signal that the universe is dead, the new study suggests.The universe is about 13.8 billion years old. We still have a few trillions of years to go until the lights go out for good. The first of these explosions won’t take place for at least another 10^1100 years. “If you write it out, it’s just a whole page of zeros,” study author Matt Caplan, an assistant professor of physics at Illinois State University (ISU) in the United States, told ‘National Geographic’.

Prof. Caplan calculated how dead stars might change over time and revealed when the last supernova will explode in the universe’s distant future. He explored potential stellar explosions and found that giant stars explode in supernovas when iron builds up in their core, triggering the star’s collapse. Iron will accumulate because it can’t be burned, and this will cause the collapse before becoming a supernova. Eventually, smaller stars known as white dwarfs get denser and become black dwarf stars that actually produce iron. During this time, white dwarfs will cool down, grow dimmer, freeze solid and no longer shine. “You wouldn’t even see … [the dwarf] in front of you, until it exploded,” Prof. Caplan adds. “After that, the universe will be cold and dark and sad forever. Unless there’s new physics that we haven’t discovered.”According to the findings, the biggest black dwarfs will explode first, followed by the smaller stars until there are none left. About 1 % (a billion trillion) of all stars that exist today will end their lives this way. Only black dwarfs about 1.2 to 1.4 times the mass of the Sun will explode.

After these last explosions, the cosmos will be “cold, dark and boring,” Prof. Caplan told ‘Newsweek’. “So much time will have passed by the time the last black dwarf supernova occurs that I can’t imagine anything interesting happening anywhere ever again. Ever.”

Prof. Caplan isn’t too bothered that he’ll never see a black dwarf, or that there won’t be anyone or anything around to witness the event. “I became a physicist for one reason. I wanted to think about the big questions- why is the universe here, and how will it end?,” he commented in an ISU news item. In the meantime, he’ll attempt to simulate black dwarf supernova. “If we can’t see them in the sky then at least we can see them on a computer.”