Word: cosmos
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
That turns out to be enormously important. Knowing the characteristic sizes and also the temperatures, to a millionth of a degree, of these warm and cool regions gives theoretical physicists all sorts of information about the newborn cosmos. They were already pretty sure, from the equations of nuclear physics and from measurements of the relative amounts of hydrogen, helium and lithium in the universe, that protons, neutrons and electrons (the building blocks of every atom in the cosmos) add up to only about 5% of the so-called critical density--what it would take to bring the cosmic expansion essentially...
...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...