"Benford-TheFarFuture" - читать интересную книгу автора (Benford Gregory)

maybe there simply had not been enough time to bring about the final implosion.
Newton, troubled by this, avoided cosmological issues.

Given enough time, matter will seek its own kind, stars smacking into each
other, making greater and greater stars. This will go on even after the stars
gutter out.

When a body meets a body, coming through the sky . . . Stars will inevitably
collide, meet, merge. All the wisdom and order of planets and suns will finally
compress into the marriage of many stars, plunging down the pit of gravity to
become black holes. For the final fate of nearly all matter shall be the dark
pyre of collapse.

Galaxies are as mortal as stars. In the sluggish slide of time, the spirals
which had once gleamed with fresh brilliance will be devoured by ever-growing
black holes. Inky masses will blot out whole spiral arms of dim red. The already
massive holes at galactic centers will swell from their billion-stellar-mass
sizes at present, to chew outward, gnawing without end.

From the corpses of stars, collisions will form either neutron stars or black
holes, within about a thousand billion years (in exponential notation, 10[sup
12] years). Even the later and longest-lived stars cannot last beyond 10[sup 14]
years. Collisions between stars will strip away all planets in 10[sup 15] years.

Blunt thermodynamics will still command, always seeking maximum disorder. In
10[sup 17] years, the last white dwarf stars will have cooled to be utterly
black dwarfs, temperatures about 5 degrees Kelvin (Absolute). In time, even hell
would freeze over.

Against an utterly black sky, shadowy cinders of stars will glide. Planets,
their atmospheres frozen out into waveless lakes of oxygen, will glide in
meaningless orbits, warmed by no ruby star glow. The universal clock would run
down to the last tick of time.

But the universe is no static lattice of stars. It grows. The Big Bang would be
better termed the Enormous Emergence, space-time snapping into existence intact
and whole, of a piece. Then it grew, the fabric of space lengthening as time
increased.

With the birth of space-time came its warping by matter, each wedded to the
other until time eternal. An expanding universe cools, just as a gas does. The
far future will freeze, even if somehow life manages to find fresh sources of
power.

Could the expansion ever reverse? This is the crucial unanswered riddle in
cosmology. If there is enough matter in our universe, eventually gravitation
will win out over the expansion. The "dark matter" thought to infest the
relatively rare, luminous stars we see could be dense enough to stop the
universe's stretching of its own space-time. This density is related to how old
the universe is.