Space/Science — HabitableZone

Space/Science

Speculative Future History of the Universe

The core of the Red Supergiant star is at least 6 solar masses. You have your fill, living off the various forms of radiant energy there. But by the time you get there the star is already old, and you barely have time to rest. After billions of years of burning its hydrogen fuel, the star has reached a condition where the fusion reactions in its core are producing such a high flux of neutrinos that the neutrinos carry away badly needed energy from the core. This causes the core to collapse and heat up as the reactions 'burn' at higher temperatures. This produces more neutrinos and the process runs away. As the core collapses, the density increases so high that suddenly the neutrinos can't escape, and within a few hours the bottled up energy causes the star to detonate. This produces a reversed shock that compresses the core matter beyond its mechanical ability to support itself.

As the core is compressed it forms an increasingly dense nugget. The outer kilometer or so is a crust made of heavy nuclei (like iron) and electrons. Below this, protons and electrons have combined to form a zone 3-5 kilometers thick of superfluid neutrons. Superfluidity is a strange state of matter where quantum effects allow bizarre behavior to occur. In most of the central zone superfluid neutrons are joined by a small fraction of superconducting protons and electrons. These phases of matter allow extremely advanced life forms, like yourself, to persist, although briefly before the next transition. But lucky for you the extreme gravity also causes time to dilate in a varying gradient as a function of radius, allowing life to anticipate and match pace with the cataclysmic events unfolding around it. When the compressed core reaches a size equal to the black hole horizon size for that mass, or Schwarzschild radius, it explosively sheds the rest of its mass in a supernova. The black hole formed is about 35 kilometers in diameter. No matter or light can escape, and you were trapped inside. From the instant the event horizon formed all matter inside the black hole collapsed infinitely, crushed beyond pure neutrons, crushed beyond quarks and gluons, crushed to less than 10E(-33) centimeters, beyond any observable size, . Fortunately, time is dilated infinitely, and from your perspective this stage only lasts for an infinitesimal Planke timespan, about 10E(-43) seconds.

Matter and light can still fall into the black hole. If it didn't happen so fast, you could still see the universe 'outside' from where you are. But due to the intense gravity you are now living in a highly dilated time frame. In the first few fractions of a second as the event horizon formed, events outside appeared to quicken. Galaxies swirled visibly, spinning faster and faster until they were a blur. They moved, then shot across the sky, around and around, joining billions of others, faster and faster. The whole universe then smeared into a bright sheet that covered the entire visible sky. As trillions of years passed outside the sky darkened, masses accumulated and coalesced. Black holes merged, and eventually were swallowed up by the same black hole in which you resided. The outside universe underwent heat death. All this occured in the first infinitesimal fraction of a second of your subjective time within the black hole.

Space-time is infinitely curved around a black hole. Light or matter passing the event horizon of a black hole is therefore infinitely delayed, though not completely captured. As more and more matter from the outside universe was gobbled up, it appeared compressed into the massive spherical shell of the event horizon. Pure Newtonian physics predicts that no net gravitational force is added to the interior volume of the massive hollow shell. Meanwhile the mass increased, as did the Schwarzschild radius. The event horizon persisted but swelled, the specific volume increasing and the original matter that created the black hole becoming less dense. The black hole expanded like a Big Bang universe.

The Planck time: 10E(-43) seconds. After this time gravity can be considered to be a classical background in which particles and fields evolve following quantum mechanics. A region about 10E(-33) cm across is homogeneous and isotropic, The temperature is T=10E(32)K.

Inflation begins: In Linde's chaotic inflation model inflation starts at the Planck time, although it could start when the temperature falls to point at which the symmetry of Grand Unified Theory (GUT) is spontaneously broken. This occurs when the temperature is around 10E(27) to 10E(28)K at 10E(-35) seconds after the Big Bang.

Inflation ends: The time is 10E(-33) seconds, the temperature is again 10E(27) to 10E(28)K as the vacuum energy density that drove inflation is converted into heat. At the end of inflation the expansion rate is so fast that the apparent age of the Universe is only 10E(-35) seconds. Because of inflation, the homogeneous regions from the Planck time are at least 100 cm across, a growth by a factor greater than 10E(35) since the Planck time. However, quantum fluctuations during inflation also create a pattern of low amplitude inhomogeneities with a random pattern having equal power on all scales.

Baryogenesis: a small difference between the reaction rates for matter and antimatter leads to a mix with about 100,000,001 protons for every 100,000,000 antiprotons (and 100,000,000 photons). When nearly all the matter in the outside universe is pressed into the event horizon of the black hole, its growth will slow down. Black holes get the energy to radiate Hawking radiation from their rest mass energy. If a black hole is not accreting mass from outside, it will lose mass by Hawking radiation, and will eventually evaporate. The Hawking radiation itself would consist of fiercely energetic particles, antiparticles, and gamma rays. If a pair of virtual particles is created at the event horizon, one antiparticle will escape to the outside, to be recaptured and crushed by the event horizon, and one particle will escape to the inside where a flat spacetime exists. A preferential process, such as time dilation effects on nuclear reactions, could allow most of the rest mass of the event horizon to be radiated to the interior in the form of ordinary particles. In this way energy is conserved, and matter is recycled in the new spacetime volume.

Universe grows and cools until 0.0001 seconds after the Big Bang with temperature about T=10E(13) K. Antiprotons annihilate with protons leaving only matter, but with a very large number of photons per surviving proton and neutron.

Universe grows and cools until 1 second after the Big Bang, with temperature T=10E(10) K. The weak interaction freezes out with a proton/neutron ratio of about 6. The homogeneous patch is now at least 10E(19.5) cm across. If you survived the black hole phase, you can now live as before, surviving on various forms of radiation. You would actually be devolving, as time progressed, requiring much less effort to obtain energy. This would seem unlikely, but evolution is not constrained to move in only one direction.

Universe grows and cools until 100 seconds after the Big Bang. The temperature is 1 billion degrees, 10E(9) K. Electrons and positrons annihilate to make more photons, while protons and neutrons combine to make deuterons. Almost all of the deuterons combine to make helium. The final result is about 3/4 hydrogen, 1/4 helium by mass; deuteron/proton ratio 30 parts per million. There are about 2 billion photons per proton or neutron.

One month after the Big Bang the processes that convert the radiation field to a blackbody spectrum become slower than the expansion of the Universe, so the spectrum of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) preserves information back to this time.

Matter density equals radiation density 56,000 years after the Big Bang. The temperature is 9000 K. Dark matter inhomogeneities can start to collapse.

Protons and electrons combine to form neutral hydrogen. Universe becomes transparent. Temperature is T=3000 K, time is 380,000 years after the Big Bang. Ordinary matter can now fall into the dark matter clumps. The CMB travels freely from this time until now, so the CMB anisotropy gives a picture of the Universe at this time.

The first stars form 100-200 million years after the Big Bang, and reionize the Universe.

The first supernovae explode and spread carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, silicon, magnesium, iron, and so on up through uranium throughout the Universe. Primitive carbon-based life can emerge. For advanced non-corporeal life the opportunity exists to skip this universe, and travel forward in time to the next one in the cores of black holes formed by supernovae.

Galaxies form as many clumps of dark matter, stars and gas merge together.

Clusters of galaxies form.

13.7 billion years after the Big Bang: the temperature is 2.725 Kelvin. The homogeneous patch is at least 10(29) cm across, which is larger than observable Universe. This is the Schwarzschild radius for a black hole with a mass equal to the visible universe. This predicts that the event horizon will remain in place forever and any new life that evolves will be unable to escape, unless they evolve to survive in the coronas and cores of stars, and eventually supernovae. The process continues in one direction only.

References:

http://imagine.gsfc.nasa.gov/docs/ask_astro/answers/970408c.html

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/BBhistory.html

http://www.astronomycafe.net/qadir/q1808.html

http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/SchwarzschildRadius.html

http://casa.colorado.edu/~ajsh/hawk.html

http://curious.astro.cornell.edu/question.php?number=342

http://www.aoc.nrao.edu/~smyers/courses/astro12/L19.html

http://www.astro.ucla.edu/~wright/cosmolog.htm

Disclaimer: this history was lifted in whole or in part from other websites, twisted and perverted by my own illogic and ignorance, to form a merely plausible half-cohesive semi-fictional speculation that will probably make professional cosmologists freak out, caper around the room like monkeys, and shout "NO NO NO! You idiot!" Well, too bad, take it or leave it.

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