Will our universe come to an end?
Will it rip to shreds in a flash?
Collapse on itself?
Or will it slowly freeze to death?
Scientists are imaging the unimaginable
And they're coming up with some wild ideas about how it's all going to end.
This is the end of the universe.
A battle is taking place in the farthest reaches of space.
No one can see it,
but scientists are certain that it's happening and that the outcome is grim
The universe is going to end.
It won't happen for billions of years,
but there is no way out.
Working out how it will end is the challenge of astrophysicists around the world.
They're pointing high-tech equipment out toward the heavens
to unlock the secrets of our fate.
The possibilities are frightening.
In one scenario...
gravity pulls the universe back into itself similar to air being let out of an inflated balloon
The universe goes back to its original size.
This is the Big Crunch.
It'd be the end universe in a big fireball
as all the matter collapses onto itself
That'd be pretty dramatic.
Then there's the Big Chill.
The universe expands until the nuclear furnaces that power all the stars burn out.
The universe grows cold and dies.
A second possibility is actually kind of sad.
The universe will continue to expand forever
and it will just grow into an increasingly cold and lonely place
as the expansion removes our nearest neighbors from us
and we just end up a single isolated community... of stars and galaxies.
Then again, there could be a much more spectacular end
in which everything is ripped to shreds, down to the last atom.
Think of it like a balloon that is filled with too much air.
It pops.
It's much more dramatic than the Big Chill
and just as fateful as the Big Crunch
The universe continues to expand,
but at an ever-quickening pace.
And in fact, the pace is so great
that even the space-time... fabric cannot hold the universe together
However the end comes, it will be a dramatic conclusion.
To understand how it all could end, scientists turn to how it began.
The mystery starts to be solved here
at the Mount Wilson Observatory overlooking Pasadena, California.
In 1929, while looking through what was then the world's largest telescope,
Edwin Hubble makes a strange discover
The universe is expanding.
Hubble's discovery led to a whole new picture of the universe.
That it was a dynamic environment and that it evolved.
It changed in time.
And that's different from pictures that people had of cosmology previous to that.
Before Hubble, scientists said that the universe was static and unchanging
Hubble's discovery that the universe is expanding meant it had a starting point
A beginning.
That brought the idea forward that
hey, what if we ran the film backwards in time
and found the point at which that began?
And that was where the idea of a Big Bang came from
The Big Bang.
That fraction of a second when the universe and everything in it
exploded into existence from a point smaller than an atom.
One common misconception about the Big Bang
is that we can identify a point in space where the Big Bang occurred.
But in fact, it's more appropriate to think of the Big Bang
as a simultaneous creation everywhere of space,
which is then continuing to expand until the present day.
If the universe has been expanding since the Big Bang,
scientists must consider that it will stop expanding at some point.
The question is: how?
The most obvious answer involves gravity
What goes up, must come down.
Stars and galaxies and everything else might reverse direction.
The universe would collapse in what some scientists call a Big Crunch
Take the top and then see the other handle? And just jerk them apart.
A model rocket offers clues to how the Big Crunch would work.
The rocket is like the universe expanding into space out of the Big Bang
An initial bang allows the rocket to overcome the pull of gravity.
Five, four, three, two, one!
The engine blast gets the rocket moving off its launch pad.
It accelerates into the air and breaks free of gravity's pull,
for the moment.
It appears as it's climbing upward that it will never stop.
But Earth's gravity won't allow this to go on forever.
Eventually, when the fuel is exhausted,
the rocket coasts about a meter higher, stops,
and is pulled back to Earth.
This is what would happen with a Big Crunch.
The entire universe is essentially pulled back to its launch pad.
The universe itself has its own momentum, its own energy.
It's moving outward.
But eventually there's a point where possibly the universe will stop that moving outward
just like the rocket that we saw and have to fall back in upon itself
and collapse again under the force of its own gravity.
In this scenario,
the universe could return to its original state just before the Big Bang
setting the stage for a perpetual seesaw of creation and destruction.
The Big Crunch theory moved to a scientific backburner.
Cosmologists worked out that there must be some form of energy
that keeps the universe from collapsing.
The existence of such a force
leads to new theories about what the universe is made of
and how it might end.
And evidence about how this might play out
is found in some of the most powerful and mysterious phenomena in the cosmos
Black Holes.
Predicting how the universe will end
involves some of the most advanced technology known to man.
On a remote volcano on the island of Hawaii,
astronomers are monitoring a battle in space that is shaping the fate of the universe.
At an elevation of nearly 4,300 meters,
the Keck Telescopes bring astronomers from all over the world
nearer to space for a clearer view of the cosmos.
They come here because the telescopes work best far away from city lights
and as high as possible above the Earth's polluted air.
Harsh conditions make it difficult to work here.
But for scientists in pursuit of the great mysteries above,
it's paradise.
So, this is a remarkable location.
But of course the air is very thin,
it's extremely hard to work here.
But these telescopes are amazingly powerful.
But we're ambitious astronomers.
We don't just start looking at easy objects.
We try hard to look at the very faintest objects
so we can understand the extremities of the universe,
the most distant objects that tell us about the universe when it was very young.
Here, astronomers like Richard Ellis are working on a problem
that has been all consuming for cosmologists since Edwin Hubble
They know the universe is expanding.
But what they don't know is how fast.
It will be difficult to predict exactly how the universe will end
until they solve this mystery.
The answers lie in the past.
An astronomer like myself
uses a ground-based telescope as a time machine.
We are looking back in time to study distant galaxies
seen as they were a long, long time ago
Richard Ellis, and scientists like him,
train their telescopes on light from the past.
They're seeing things that validate long-standing theories about the cosmos
by observing objects that technology has only recently been able to see.
And what astronomers are finding
is that one of Einstein's predictions, in particular,
just might be responsible for the crushing end of the cosmos.
Einstein said that there has to be more mass in the universe
than we can actually see.
He predicted that there would patches of invisible supergravity
from which not even light could escape.
One of the distant galaxies that astronomers found
revealed a powerful source of x-rays from something that they could not see.
It was in the Constellation Signus, and emitted no light.
But something was there. Whatever was emitting these x-rays
had a mass about seven times that of Earth's sun.
There wasn't a name for it, so they called it a Black Hole.
Black Holes offer scientists an analogy to how the Big Crunch Theory works.
When certain stars run out of fuel they collapse in on themselves
into a smaller and far denser mass that attracts more and more matter,
just like the Big Crunch.
The gravitational pull is so powerful
that anything that falls near a Black Hole will be forever trapped
Not even light can escape.
It's a mind-boggling concept that something invisible is detectable
and offers a view to our ultimate fate
This black tarp represents space.
And space is relatively flat.
But when you put a massive object into space it curves it.
This is a penny.
And notice how it comes into a really beautiful circular orbit
Basically, the Black Hole trapped it into an orbit around itself.
And that orbit becomes very circular as it gets closer.
And now the penny will eventually disappear,
go inside the Black Hole.
What if our universe eventually collapsed upon itself?
What if eventually all of the matter in the universe were enough
to gravitationally pause it to collapse into one huge Black Hole?
Then at the end you would end up with a big singularity.
So that's one possible future of the universe that we end up in a singularity.
We came from one, we might go into one
And that's one way you can look at it on a big macroscopic scale,
that Black Holes, in some ways,
their physics is very similar to what started the universe.
And so, that may be how we end up.
Black Holes exist in isolated areas throughout the cosmos.
A Black Holes' gravitational pull is a scaled down version of the force
that could cause the universe to collapse.
That force is dark matter.
And dark matter is what scientists often call cosmic glue.
Hi Matthew. Hello.
So, let's do some cosmology here.
Dark matter, attracts other objects
while its gravitational attraction is a positive force.
Dark energy, we don't really understand what it is
but it's a negative repulsing effect that pushes galaxies away from each other
The whirlpool in Richard Ellis's demonstration
represents the gravitational force of dark matter.
The green dye coming out of the syringe
shows how the stuff of the universe collapses under the force of dark matter
The presence of dark matter acts as the focus for the gas in the universe,
bringing structure together.
This is how the Milky Way developed as the universe expanded.
Little things merging into big things
The positive constructive force of gravity.
Now if this was the only force in the universe
and the universe would stop expanding at some point in the future
and eventually the universe would stop collapsing,
gravity would eventually halt the expansion
and bring it back together in a Big Crunch.
This dark matter is responsible for producing galaxies in a finite amount of time.
If we had to rely on the gravity of atomic matter to produce galaxies,
we wouldn't be anywhere,
we wouldn't exist today to be able to ask these questions.
'Cause there's not enough time
for gravity to have condensed the atomic matter that we know exists in the cosmos
So dark matter has to exist
to give, to help this process out and speed it up.
Yet the universe continues to expand and isn't showing any signs of collapsing.
This suggests the opposing force of dark energy could be stronger than dark matter.
But it will take scientific detective work to find out
They look to one of the most violent forces in the universe for clues.
We're studying exploding stars
to try to understand if they can tell us the rate at which the universe is expanding
These are explosions at the end of the lives of stars, not unlike our sun.
The fuel that these stars have in their center is as, is spent.
The star collapses, the outer part expands,
and the star becomes something called a White Dwarf.
White Dwarf stars sometimes have other stars orbiting nearby.
A companion star.
A massive explosion could happen
if the companion star's debris falls onto the White Dwarf
causing a spectacular fireworks display in the cosmos.
Scientists consider exploding stars, or supernovae,
like in these images captured by the Hubble Telescope,
to be reliable tell-tales of how fast the universe expands.
Their brief and bright explosions
allow scientists to track the universe's expansion
and give them a way to measure its speed.
Essentially they are White Dwarf stars that become nuclear bombs.
They explode with a certain brightness and a certain length of time.
It takes a certain amount of time for that brightness to dissipate.
They are essentially standard candles
Any one of these will look the same no matter where it is in the universe
Astronomers measure the distance and speed of these exploding stars
by measuring the amount of red light they emit.
The faster the star moves away from us,
the redder its light appears.
When we study the spectrum of a supernova,
we get indicators of its chemical composition,
we understand the velocities as the supernova shell expands
following the initial explosion.
And so there are a lot of physics that we can study about the individual events.
The expansion rate of galaxies containing stars like supernovae
can then be used to interpret how the rest of the universe is moving outward.
We know this because we can compare the velocities of galaxies with their distances.
These are the clues that lead astronomers to answer
just how soon the universe will reverse direction
and come back together in a Big Crunch
Or, this information might lead to an entirely different conclusion.
Dr. Ellis is looking at clues at the Keck Observatory in Hawaii.
While the telescope is on the top of a huge volcano,
he is in a viewing room on another part of the island.
...mission lines, Johan.
In the red, in the red side I think.
At the same time,
Johan Reshar is at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California
evaluating the light from a distant galaxy that the Keck Telescope captured in Hawaii
He's looking to see if any of the known elements coming from the galaxy
are in the red spectrum and moving farther away.
We can interpret that as a velocity of how much the galaxy is moving away from us.
We can really interpret how the entire universe is behaving, is expanding.
Interpreting red shift
is the cornerstone of the quest to pin down the fate of the universe.
Clearer pictures of the universe that have only been possible in recent years
have led cosmologists to conclude that the red shift of distant galaxies
is greater than previously predicted.
This is startling.
Not only is the universe expanding, it's speeding up.
Nothing in the observable cosmos could account for an accelerating universe.
And yet the data seem irrefutable.
This has to mean that an invisible force is working against gravity.
Cosmologists have come up with a name,
dark energy.
So, when the universe was young, gravity was the most dominant force.
And so what we see here is galaxies as particles on the surface of the water
are bound together by gravity.
And a point about seven billion years ago,
dark energy and gravity are pretty well in balance.
But the universe continues to expand, the density goes down,
and so dark energy starts to take over.
And lo and behold, the universe starts to accelerate.
So dark energy is now the dominant property of space.
So, the universe started out with a certain amount of energy.
And we know, we're trying to understand how much energy there is.
And we know the universe is expanding as it moves outward with time.
We also know now that the universe's expansion is accelerating.
And we don't know, is that acceleration going to slow down or not.
We're still trying to understand that.
So in understanding what's going to happen to the fate of the universe
we have to know how much energy is there.
How much matter is there?
Well, the history of the universe
is really a battle between dark matter and dark energy.
These two forces are in opposition.
And so both the history of the universe and its ultimate fate
is really the competition between these two forces.
The Big Crunch theory was a result
of scientists interpreting that dark matter is the dominant force.
But astronomers now suspect that dark energy might be much stronger.
If so, the end could be dramatic and violent
It pulls apart solar systems, it pulls apart stars.
And eventually it grows so strong that it pulls apart matter itself,
breaks bonds, pulls apart atoms,
and reduces everything to fundamental particles and that's the end of the universe.
The battle between dark matter, the force that holds the universe together,
and dark energy, the force seeking to tear it apart,
has set the universe on a path of destruction.
If dark matter is the victor, the universe might collapse.
If dark energy rules the cosmos, it could rip to shreds.
The expansion grows so strong that it tears up the entire universe.
It'll be a strange twist of fate.
Dark energy, the force that propelled matter to form a magnificent universe,
continues to push it outward and drives it to its demise.
To find out of if dark energy is in fact winning the battle,
scientists will first need to know
how fast the universe is actually expanding.
The most remarkable feature of the universe is that it's expanding
Every galaxy is moving away from every other galaxy.
We can illustrate that with this balloon as we expand it.
We see that every dot drawn on this black balloon,
like the night sky, is moving away from every other dot.
But there is something else that we know about the universe,
something else that we know about the expansion.
That is that the expansion is getting faster.
The universe is accelerating.
The size of the universe is getting bigger at a faster and faster rate.
And we don't know exactly how fast it's accelerating.
But if it's accelerating fast enough, then something really dramatic could happen.
The universe could end up tearing itself apart in a Big Rip.
This is perfect, this is great that you rigged this up.
So, this is a giant version of a demo that I do in class.
Doctor Robert Caldwell attempts an Earth-bound experiment
to show how dark energy affects the acceleration of the universe.
He uses a paintball gun mounted on a truck.
Yeah, and basically I mean, we could adjust the angle in any way that you want it.
What do you think about this?
I think down at the ground a bit more
He sends the truck coasting down an incline.
Earth's gravity pulls the vehicle downhill,
which is similar to how dark energy propels the universe outward,
causing it to expand.
Gravity pulls the truck forward at an increasing speed.
The gun fires paint at the ground at regular one-second intervals.
Caldwell measures the distance between the paint dots
to calculate just how fast the truck was accelerating.
He'll use the data from this experiment to see how gravity's force
compares to dark energy's force in the cosmos.
We started thinking about the Big Rip
when it was discovered that the expansion of the universe was accelerating.
The degree of acceleration is not known
And it's the subject of a lot of effort by astronomers today
to try and figure out exactly how fast the expansion is growing.
What is the past evolution of the universe in detail?
And if we conclude from that, what is the future evolution of the universe?
It's not known exactly how fast it's accelerating.
There's some evidence that the acceleration is beyond a certain threshold.
And beyond that threshold there's a runaway effect that could take place
and it would rip apart the universe
How does it look? Fantastic.
I think we've got some good data. Excellent.
Why don't we measure this? Great.
Give you that end. All right. I'll take this.
Five-feet, eight, eight and a half inches.
The point of the paintball experiment
is to find parallels between the truck propelled by the invisible force of gravity
and the accelerating universe.
I'm glad we got the long tape measure
because it's really growing pretty fast, the interval.
Within a few measurements
the distance between the paint spots increases by nearly seven times.
If the truck were in space, at this rate
it would travel faster than 160 kilometers per hour within a minute.
And over 1600 kilometers per hour within ten minutes.
They're getting big now.
The question for Robert Caldwell
is whether the same kind of expansion and acceleration
are happening on a cosmic scale.
This right here is the data that I took with Erik.
The cumulative distance traveled by the car as a function of time.
And that's beautiful.
It's this nice parabolic shape.
That's exactly what you expect for an accelerating body.
And over here I've got another calculation going on
where I'm working out the acceleration of the universe.
Robert Caldwell's calculation
shows that forces on Earth are similar to forces in space.
This demonstration then gives a sense of the dramatic rate of expansion
that appears to be happening in the cosmos.
By eye it might be difficult to appreciate how good a fit it is.
But I can tell you that the rate of statistics
indicates that an accelerating universe is a very good fit to this data.
If, like the truck, the universe is continually accelerating,
then billions of years from now the universe might tear itself apart
All the distant stars and galaxies would be pulled away from each other
They'll be pulled away from us.
But moreover, we won't have time to grow cold and lonely.
It'll actually be pretty exciting and dramatic and violent.
Stars are ripped apart, planets are ripped apart,
and even atoms are torn apart before the universe ends.
It wouldn't happen for at least fifty billion years.
But still, it's an interesting fate for the universe.
What would atoms ripping apart look like?
Things like coffee cups are solid
Atoms join together to create something
that will hold a cappuccino without leaking a single drop.
Zoom in through the cup like sailing through the cosmos,
pass the molecules, and into the atoms.
The solid cup is nothing more than a fabric of atomic particles
that formed a bond to become matter.
If these particles were to move apart,
the bonds that hold this cup together stop working.
The atoms no longer support molecules.
The connections between the miniscule particles dissolve.
Matter, in the form of this cup, seizes to exist.
It disintegrates. Gone from the existence.
This is the dramatic end that Robert Caldwell foresees for the universe.
What you would see if you were standing on Earth or standing on some other planet
that happened to still be around at that time,
you would see something that looks like a wall of darkness approaching you.
And as the wall of darkness approaches
stars would go out, galaxies would go out,
and then eventually that wall of darkness would surround the planet.
And then pretty soon atoms themselves are torn apart and that's it.
Just the wall of darkness shrinks down to a point and that's the end of the universe.
According to Robert Caldwell, that moment is still billions of years off.
Leaving plenty of time to refine their research.
In a way, this is like a detective story
We're trying to figure out
what is the culprit or who is the culprit responsible for the cosmic acceleration.
We think we know its name.
We call it dark energy, but we don't know the modus operandi
We don't know exactly how it works.
And what's needed is more information.
More information about the physics behind the dark energy.
We want to know exactly what it does and exactly what it's made out of.
And in answering those questions
we'll be able to figure out exactly what is the fate of the universe.
The Big Rip is one theory.
Cruising just above Earth's atmosphere and peering deep into space,
the Hubble Telescope provides scientists with clues to a less violent,
but equally unavoidable, end of the universe.
Scientists now say the universe is expanding.
And that depending on how fast it is accelerating,
it might end in a big rip where everything tears apart
It's also possible that it will continue to expand,
but at a slower rate.
The universe wouldn't rip apart,
but would become dark, cold, and lifeless.
If dark energy turns out to be constant
a constant property of space and continues at the same rate that it is now,
the universe will keep expanding forever
and it will be a very sad state I think
In the end it just chills out.
Everything cools down.
Evidence for the Big Chill and all of the theories for the end of the universe, in part,
come from the Hubble Space Telescope
It has been orbiting Earth since 1990
and has an unobstructed view of the cosmos.
The extraordinary images it beams back to Earth
are amazing in their clarity and detail
And because of Hubble,
scientists can make better predictions about how the universe will end.
So, here is an example of a very deep field
that was taken by the Hubble Space Telescope,
which literally you point the space telescope at a single region in space
And if you looked at this from a typical ground-based image,
before Hubble was launched,
first of all it's a, literally a, almost size of a postage stamp.
And so suddenly the first Hubble deep field that was ever taken
had four thousand galaxies that looked just like the galaxies here
that were never visible before from the ground.
Tremendous power.
Each of these smudges in their own right is another galaxy.
Each one of these galaxies contains about a hundred billion stars.
Astronomers eagerly await all images from Hubble.
Each bringing them closer to solving the mystery about the fate of the universe.
Through image processing with computers
and differencing frames on, taken on different nights,
we can take out the other galaxies in the image
and we're left with just this blob.
Looks like nothing to you, but that's supernova.
And this is an object that could never have been discovered
before Hubble Space Telescope was launched.
Hubble sees more than just stars and galaxies.
It just might be on to one of the key ingredients of space
An invisible ingredient that could put the brakes on dark energy's effect
and cause a Big Chill.
That's dark matter.
Scientists talk about dark matter as the substance that holds the universe together
and could prevent a Big Rip.
Evidence that dark matter exists
is seen in some of Hubble's images of nearby galaxies.
It sometimes appears as though other galaxies surround them.
The other galaxies are not really there at all.
Rather, they are reflections of more distant galaxies coming from behind.
Astronomers suspect this optical illusion is dark matter
causing a weird distortion of light called gravitational lensing.
The light from the more distant galaxies
is literally bent by the curvature of space caused by stars and dark matter in its path
The more dark matter there is between Earth and the distant galaxy
the more the light will be bent and the greater the force to cause a Big Chill.
The gravitational lensing is a tremendous tool for the astronomer
because we can measure the distortion in background galaxies
and use it to trace the distribution of dark matter on various scales.
We're looking at a distribution of idealized galaxies here along the sky
And the light from these distant galaxies is patterning through clumps of dark matter
What you look at is not really what's happening.
It's a bit like wearing spectacles and not knowing that you're wearing them.
And if you can tell how much that bending is occurring,
you can map the dark matter
and you can also see well, if there's dark matter there,
is the universe around that dark matter behaving the way it should given the gravity or not?
Identifying which energy force dominates
dark matter or dark energy,
will give scientists more confidence about whether a Big Chill or a Big Rip
will be our fate.
The best evidence shows dark energy as the driving force.
But by how much?
Solving this mystery depends on astronomers
finding ways to measure how fast the universe is moving.
On Earth it's simple to determine how fast something moves.
An airplane, for example, is relatively close.
We can look at it and calculate its speed by estimating the distance it travels
and timing how long it takes to get from one point to another.
But a star's light can travel for millions or billions of years before it can be seen on Earth.
By the time its light gets here, the star will be long gone.
And it's too far away to gauge its speed or distance traveled with any certainty.
The universe is expanding.
Only scientists cannot give precise answers about how fast.
The mystery moves closer to being solved by imaging the cosmos with greater precision.
You couldn't even observe the galaxies that are in this image
before Hubble Space Telescope was launched.
So the increase in our capability with technology recently has been astounding.
It has enabled us to do things,
to chart the evolution of the universe in a way that we never could have imagined
Clearer images from space make it easier to estimate the rate of expansion.
If the universe continues to expand with time,
then ultimately all of the energy sources, the nuclear furnaces and stars
would run out and die and the universe would actually get very cold.
And there would be something called the Big Chill.
In the Big Chill scenario
Earth could become a lonely cold planet as the universe expands.
Distances between stars grow so vast that they nearly disappear from view.
Over time they burn out.
And eventually the entire universe ends in a frozen state.
These are ideas that sprang from the work of Einstein and Hubble.
Only neither of them lived long enough to see these results.
Imagine what Edwin Hubble and Albert Einstein would think
if they were alive today watching the progress in the subject
You know, Einstein thinking about the expanding universe
as a natural solution to his equations,
but puzzled you know, that the universe didn't appear to be changing.
Edwin Hubble, desperate to measure whether the universe
was slowing down in its expansion.
In fact, you know, they were both wrong.
It's speeding up.
The time that Einstein developed the general theory,
we didn't know that there were other galaxies outside of our own Milky Way galaxy.
And we didn't know that the universe was expanding.
And in fact Einstein himself,
despite the fact that his equations were screaming at him
that the universe had to be evolving,
didn't have enough confidence in that result
to say the universe must be expanding or the universe must be contracting.
Still, his work led to the scientific breakthroughs
that would identify dark matter and dark energy;
the forces that could cause a Big Chill.
This sphere demonstrates the principles behind a Big Chill.
The marbles coming out of this sphere
are like stars that were formed following the Big Bang.
Dark energy propels the stars outward.
Dark matter slows them down.
In a Big Chill the expansion would continue,
but the nuclear fuel that causes the stars to burn will eventually run out.
From Earth's perspective the first thing to go would be sunlight
The sun dims as it exhausts its last bits of nuclear fuel.
Earth would freeze and become lifeless
And billions of years after humans are gone, the cosmos expands out of view
A few newer stars might remain,
but most would have long moved away.
The furnace powering the universe burns out.
The darkened universe continues to expand.
A frozen and lifeless remnant of its once vibrant existence.
Eventually, if this keeps going,
if nothing changes in the composition of this energy density,
the universe will continue to expand forever.
It's going to get colder and colder
and eventually even the gala-, our neighboring galaxies will be receding from us so fast
that they won't be able to see them.
So the universe is going to get cold and dark
and it will be a very lonely place.
Astronomers have much to learn about the influence of dark energy and dark matter.
And much of the newest information is coming from this probe in deep space
It's sending back information
that's helping scientists to interpret the history and the fate of the universe
The night sky, by all appearance, is a quiet and peaceful place.
But in reality, there are forces that are driving it to an end.
Big science moves astronomers closer
to deciphering the universe's great mysteries.
Including its ultimate fate.
The solution to the universe's riddle
may well be hidden in this multi-colored image.
What's incredible
is that it's a map of the early universe from the moment it was conceived.
And even more fantastic,
it reveals a great story that helps cosmologists predict how it will end.
The machine that captured this is called WMAP,
a NASA satellite that's working around the clock to chart the cosmos
What we're looking at here is the edge of the visible universe.
It's the light the WMAP measured left
it's the remnant heat from the Big Bang
and this is literally the oldest light in the universe that we can see.
This fossil relic from the early universe
tells us a great deal about what the composition of matter was like,
what the expansion rate was like,
and really what the conditions were at the birth of our universe.
WMAP is one of the great astronomical breakthroughs of the 21st Century.
Nothing before it could give us such a clear image of the energy leftover from the Big Bang
Energy that scientists call the cosmic microwave background.
WMAP is measuring temperature differences
in the cosmic microwave background,
which may finally make it possible
to predict which force will dominate the universe
and how that force will bring the cosmos to its end.
The blue spots are regions in the microwave light
that was produced by the Big Bang
that are slightly colder than the average temperature.
And the red spots are regions that are slightly hotter than the average.
Temperature differences revealed by WMAP
tell scientists about the nature of the matter and energy
that is contained within the universe
They're able to analyze the light patterns
and find clues not only about the substance,
but also the fate of the universe.
We only capture a tiny part of the electromagnetic spectrum with our eyes.
And we have to go with much longer wavelengths.
Same wavelengths that are used to heat water in a microwave oven
are what we're measuring here with WMAP.
WMAP is so precise that it can detect differences in temperatures
as small as one one-thousandth of a degree.
This sensitivity helps scientists
to calculate the ratio of dark matter to dark energy.
Forces that will determine how the universe ends.
We assemble all those difference measurements
and make a map of what the variations look like.
And by turning up the contrast
we can basically subtract off this uniform glow from the Big Bang and look for a variation.
It doesn't look like much until Gary Hinshaw adjusts the contrast
Then the WMAP image comes to life.
Looking at WMAP imagery
is an essence taking a journey back through space and time
so that we might get some new ideas on the fate of the universe.
Pulling away from the probe
and following the path of the light it is collecting,
we pass Mars,
Jupiter, and Saturn,
whose reflected light takes over an hour to reach Earth.
Then, leaving the Milky Way,
we pass Andromeda, the next nearest galaxy,
whose light takes 2.3 million years to reach us.
Which means we have traveled 2.3 million years back in time.
And finally, we arrive back thirteen billion years ago,
at the beginning of visible light.
Before that, super heated hydrogen gas is everywhere.
WMAP can see this far back in history
It's confirming important facts about the universe and what's driving it to its demise
The final act for the universe becomes more easily predicted thanks to WMAP.
Its information, combined with the work of astronomers
has led to some astounding discoveries concerning a rapidly expanding universe
Rapid expansion supports the dark energy theory
and the possibility of a Big Chill or Big Rip.
We now know from all the data we've had in the last ten years
that there's, by a factor of two to one, more dark energy than dark matter.
So dark energy is the dominant constituent of energy in the universe
The evidence seems clear.
Dark energy is taking over
and is leading astronomers into new thoughts about the beginning and the end of the universe.
Before the discovery of dark energy, things were a lot simpler.
If we could determine the amount of matter in the universe
then we could say something about its ultimate destiny.
Those simple days are gone.
But the proof is adding up
and supports the idea that the universe will continue to expand
But will it do so to oblivion?
We've made huge strides over the last century
in learning something about the evolution of the universe and its expansion.
But we've now raised more questions
in some sense than we've been able to answer.
And so I think the next decade's going to be even more exciting.
Astronomers have tons and tons of challenges
that have been thrown our way by theorists.
And we are rapidly trying to figure out how to answer all of these questions
And I think that's the exciting future
Because if you can go out and really observe something, you're testing it
And that's what science is all about
The battle between dark matter and dark energy
is expected to go on for billions of years.
And humans will be long gone from Earth
when the final outcome occurs.
But no pursuit has been more significant to science
than understanding how the universe arrived,
how it works, and how it will end
It's a never ending quest.
It's driving astronomy.
What are the answers to these profound questions?
The constituents of the universe,
the nature of dark matter,
and perhaps the biggest mystery of all,
what is the ultimate fate of the universe?
www.mvgroup.org