Word: cosmos
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...these observations continue to hold up, astrophysicists can be pretty sure they have assembled the full parts list for the cosmos at last: 5% ordinary matter, 35% exotic dark matter and about 60% dark energy. They also have a pretty good idea of the universe's future. All the matter put together doesn't have enough gravity to stop the expansion; beyond that, the antigravity effect of dark energy is actually speeding up the expansion. And because the amount of dark energy will grow as space gets bigger, its effect will only increase...
...FATE OF THE COSMOS...
...negatively curved or flat (but don't try to imagine in what direction it might be curved; it's quite impossible to visualize). "What the new measurements tell us," says Turner, "is that the universe is in fact flat. Draw a triangle that reaches all the way across the cosmos, and the angles will always add up to 180[degrees...
...then the sun will have shrunk to a white dwarf, giving little light and even less heat to whatever is left of Earth, and entered a long, lingering death that could last 100 trillion years--or a thousand times longer than the cosmos has existed to date. The same will happen to most other stars, although a few will end their lives as blazing supernovas. Finally, though, all that will be left in the cosmos will be black holes, the burnt-out cinders of stars and the dead husks of planets. The universe will be cold and black...
...that's not the end, according to University of Michigan astrophysicist Fred Adams. An expert on the fate of the cosmos and co-author with Greg Laughlin of The Five Ages of the Universe (Touchstone Books; 2000), Adams predicts that all this dead matter will eventually collapse into black holes. By the time the universe is 1 trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion years old, the black holes themselves will disintegrate into stray particles, which will bind loosely to form individual "atoms" larger than the size of today's universe. Eventually, even these will decay, leaving a featureless, infinitely large...