# Tag Info

Accepted

### When will the number of stars be a maximum?

TL; DR Somewhere between now and a few hundred billion years time. (For a co-moving volume) Now read on. If stellar remnants are included, then the answer is very far in the future indeed, if and ...
• 113k
Accepted

### Will we start seeing galaxies disappear due to Universe expansion?

It is a common misconception that galaxies receding faster than light cannot be observed. There are two versions of this misconception: Galaxies that are now receding faster than light cannot be seen....
• 31.8k
Accepted

### Is there a physical limit to how far we can go?

Your 3 points are spot on. There is a finite number of galaxies we could theoretically reach for the reasons you say. The further away the distant galaxy the greater the expansion of space between ...
• 22.9k

### Could a contracting Universe create the redshift effect observed by Hubble?

Aside from being, I suspect, totally incompatible with GR, the model fails to match observations. The universe appears to be homogeneous and isotropic. In the model you suggest, Hubble's law would be ...
• 113k
Accepted

### Will gravitational waves too far away ever reach us?

The answer here is very similar to if you were asking about light. In principle gravitational waves might allow us to fractions of a second after the big bang. Electromagnetic waves can see back to ...
• 113k
Accepted

### What is left of a universe where no matter and energy exist and is there a term for this?

However, due to the Law of Conservation of Energy, I suspect that energy will be all that is left, only in equilibrium meaning no ability for energy to form matter. The law of conservation of energy ...
• 7,682

### Are there any studies that prove/disprove the Oscillating Universe Theory?

The main obstacle with the Oscillating Universe model is the pesky second law of thermodynamics — that entropy always increases within an isolated system, and never the reverse. Thus, as time ...
• 7,682
Accepted

• 87.5k
Accepted

### Possible scenarios for life in the death of open universe possible?

Your scheme of creating energy from the tidal forces in a pair of orbiting planets cannot work because of the law of conservation of energy (aka the 1st law of thermodynamics), which states that ...
• 8,862
Accepted

### Is our universe stable or metastable?

Yes ... and no. Experimentally, there's no indication that the laws of physics are changing (c.f. conservation of energy: if the laws of physics change with time, energy would not be conserved via ...
• 3,073

### false to stable vacuum transition

The standard picture of vacuum decay events is very much like nucleation in a phase transition: it starts somewhere, and then expands at a constant speed - lightspeed in this case. So the future ...
• 10.2k
Accepted

### Can gravity cause a Big Crunch, if the cosmological principle holds?

You are thinking about gravity and how it affects the universe as a whole in the wrong way. The dynamics of the universe are governed by the Friedmann equations, which can be solved to say how the ...
• 113k
Accepted

### If the Universe is infinite, would heat death be impossible?

Heat death of the Universe doesn't mean that there is no energy in it, it means it has reached thermodynamic equilibrium and hence no useful energy in it. This could in theory occur in an infinite ...
• 1,785
Accepted

### How can the observable universe shrink in a Big Rip?

I've found the answer to this is actually very interesting and (to me, at least) surprising — it is not just the light cone that shrinks, but the cosmic event horizon as well! To explain this, let us ...
• 7,682

### Light beam (1 photon) in the limited universe?

No one can say for sure because, while we have theories which fit our observations quite well, those theories require that the universe be considerably bigger than the part we can see -- light simply ...
• 7,370

### Doesn't the energy conservation law imply, that the universe can't come to a Big Freeze?

The current model ($\Lambda$CDM) predicts that space will expand exponentially, and keep on doing it indefinitely far into the future. The end result, after the stars burn out, galaxies disperse, ...
• 10.2k
1 vote

### Is the universe always expanding

It will always expand (probably). The mass and energy in the universe curves space, and it seems that there is exactly the right amount of mass and energy to keep the universe expanding forever. ...
• 87.5k
1 vote

### What happens for a "closed" universe without any content?

You are not doing anything wrong. Positively curved empty universes are forbidden. Since as you figure it out the scale factor would be imaginary.
• 481
1 vote

### What happens for a "closed" universe without any content?

I see that you are using the convention that a has units of distance and is like the radius of curvature of the universe, and you are getting that either a or t would need to be imaginary. So you can ...
• 5,132
1 vote

### Could a contracting Universe create the redshift effect observed by Hubble?

So in this model, all of the observable universe is expanding. It is simply that it is part of a larger universe which is being locally stretched, as part of a an accelerating convergence to a central ...
• 9,893
1 vote

### Could a contracting Universe create the redshift effect observed by Hubble?

For a contracting universe, space would contract as a ratio, and hence even if we could only see a small distance, we would still see blue-shifted galaxies due to the fact that the galaxies further ...
1 vote

### How long will it be until the nearby groups of galaxies are receding at speeds faster than light?

This will take about 2 trillion years. Given everything we know now, it's not too hard to predict the eventual fate of the universe. Of course there may be some changes as our knowledge advances, but ...
• 14.4k
1 vote

### How can gravity lead to the Big Crunch scenario?

In less mathy words, the Big Crunch scenario occurs if the ratio of the total density of the Universe to its expansion rate is sufficiently large$^\dagger$. As I understand your question, you're ...
• 31.8k
1 vote

### Will the Universe end by time stopping?

For a more analytical and much much less philosophical version of an answer than MacUserT's, here it is. According to MacUserT, Now, what has this to do with the ending of the universe in respect ...
• 738

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