Scott DeWar
Prof. Emeritus-Supernatural Events/Countermeasure
lets see, 100 trillion.
100,000,000,000,000
still 10 ^4 to go.
100,000,000,000,000
still 10 ^4 to go.
Over so much time*, all the baryonic matter will decay to nothing.
I'm always kind of amazed we can make this kind of measurement at all. The various methods used are really ingenious.The rate of expansion (often, the Hubble Parameter) is only recently known to any decent accuracy. (To about 2% is what I'm seeing, say, around 71-73. Previously, values between 50-80 seemed usual.)
That seems to show acceleration starting some time in the past, and increasing since then.
Given the uncertainties in the measurements, telling the rate of acceleration seems unlikely.
The basic implication is that a computation of the age of the universe cannot rely on a constant Hubble parameter values.
One measure of the age of the universe is telling the amount the background radiation is red-shifted: That shift basically integrates the effect of expansion over time. Then, knowing the rate of expansion, and inverting the integration, the age can be obtained.
An increasing Hubble parameter will make for the same shift over a smaller amount of time. Not sure quantitatively how much that would be, but I'm guessing on the order of 10%, or a small multiple thereof, for the measured acceleration, and not of the order of 100% or more. But, I could be very off on that estimate, and the estimate is very probably thrown off anyways by the basic uncertainty of the current parameter value.
Over so much time*, all the baryonic matter will decay to nothing.
There would just be the occasional flash of black holes evaporating.
Such a dark and gloomy place.
Thx!
*100 trillion years might not be long enough. At least for black hole evaporation, I think we are up in the 10^100 years range![]()
Of course, that may be nothing compared to the scenario of the Big Rip, where the acceleration of expansion is so fast that at some point, even atoms get torn apart... But it seems with our current understanding, the expansion won't get that bad.
I wonder if there could be some new types of patterns emerging on that scale?
Imagine those left-over black holes that slowly evaporate forming a pattern. I figure that most of these would be galactic black holes, so the scale would be grand. Theoretically, a group of black holes clusted around another black hole might evaporate so much energy in the direction of the center black hole that it grows instead of shrinks for a while. I wonder if there could be something creating a pattern, some form of replication possible that we haven't considered yet... I don't currently know anything particular that could come, mostly it seems that, if such black hole "clusters" that can feed a central black hole where to exist, it would just mean that the center black hole last a bit longer, nothing more fancy.Patterns... of what? And what is "that scale"?