Scientists are now ‘fairly confident’ they know how the universe will end - and it won’t be with a bang.
Instead, researchers from Illinois State University suggest that the universe will end with stars very slowly fizzling away.
Dr Matt Caplan, who led the study, said: “It will be a bit of a sad, lonely, cold place,” adding that it’s likely no-one will be around to witness the official end.
According to Dr Caplan's calculations, the end of the universe will be very dark, but could be punctuated by silent fireworks - explosions of the remnants of stars.
While massive stars in the universe tend to have dramatic explosive deaths, white dwarf stars tend to slowly shrink before dying.
Dr Caplan explained: “Stars less than about 10 times the mass of the sun do not have the gravity or density to produce iron in their cores the way massive stars do, so they can’t explode in a supernova right now.
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“As white dwarfs cool down over the next few trillion years, they’ll grow dimmer, eventually freeze solid, and become ‘black dwarf’ stars that no longer shine.”
Like white dwarfs today, they’ll be made mostly of light elements like carbon and oxygen and will be the size of the earth but contain about as much mass as the sun, Dr Caplan explained.
He said: “Stars shine because of thermonuclear fusion—they’re hot enough to smash small nuclei together to make larger nuclei, which releases energy.
“White dwarfs are ash, they’re burnt out, but fusion reactions can still happen because of quantum tunneling, only much slower.
“Fusion happens, even at zero temperature, it just takes a really long time.”
Thankfully, Dr Caplan’s calculations suggest that we still have a very long time before the end of the universe.
He added: “In years, it’s like saying the word ‘trillion’ almost a hundred times. If you wrote it out, it would take up most of a page. It’s mindbogglingly far in the future.”
