Good news everyone: it looks like the universe is going to end with a series of catastrophic
explosions.
A little while ago we did a series on the end of the world - I should say “ends”
plural, because many very final-seeming fates await the Earth, then solar system, then galaxy,
and ultimately the universe.
The very very long story short is that the universe ends in heat death, as it approaches
maximum entropy, and its eternal exponential expansion drives it to effective utter emptiness
and absolute cold.
The last interesting thing to happen will be the final explosions as the last black
holes evaporate - and even those will be relatively weak-sauce as far as space explosions go.
Just tiny pops scattered across the end of time, before an eternity of perfect boringness.
Well, I have an urgent update for you.
New calculations have revealed we may be able to look forward to one last source of astrophysical
cataclysms - a new type of supernova that can only happen at the end of the universe.
I should also warn you - if you are inclined to ask “why should we care” - then this
episode is not for you.
This information has literally zero impact on anything humans are ever likely to witness.
But for the more long-term thinkers among you, grab your popcorn because your favorite
TV show - AKA the far future of the universe - just got renewed for another season.
Let’s actually start our story at the end.
In roughly 10^32000 years from now, give or take several orders of magnitude, the last
iron star will be teetering on the edge of catastrophe.
The hyperdense crystalline ball of quantum weirdness has supported itself against gravitational
collapse by the pressure exerted by its electrons alone.
But its electrons have been vanishing for aeons.
When one too many vanish, the entire star will undergo catastrophic collapse, and then
rebound as a spectacular supernova explosion - a last firework to celebrate the end of
time.
So yeah, that’s the end of the story.
Much more climactic that the previous version, which had black holes fizzling out - at least this
one has some decent ka-booms.
The update is due to new work by astrophysicist Matt Caplan, and I’ll get to the details
of that finding.
But first, there are many questions to be answered - like how do stars including our Sun end up as one of these
“iron stars” in the first place?
And what’s happening to their electrons?
To get to the bottom of these mysteries we’ll need to rewind to the beginning of the story.
Well not quite the very beginning, but on the timescales of iron stars pretty close
to it.
We’re a mere 13.7 billion years after the big bang, when one of these iron stars was
in its extremely brief phase as a bright ball of hydrogen, bathing a young planetary system
in the energy produced by its fusion core.
On one of those planets - the third one out - a steamship is making its slow journey to
a place that the local carbon based lifeforms call “England”.
On that ship - the SS Pilsna - Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar - Chandra to his friends - was
pondering the far future of the star whose warm light now bathed the deck.
Chandra was one of very few in the world who knew that fate.
In fact, he was on his way to Cambridge to begin his graduate studies with Ralph Fowler,
the guy who had just discovered what that fate would be.
This was in 1930, and while everyone else enjoyed a period of relative peace between
the world wars, the scientific world was in the midst of a revolution.
The new science of quantum mechanics had shattered our classical understanding of the world in
many ways.
Fowler, for example, had discovered a new, theoretical state of ultra-dense matter - degenerate
matter - in which atoms are stripped of their electrons, and then those electrons are crammed
so close together that all possible quantum states are occupied.
Now electrons can’t overlap - can’t occupy identical quantum states - a weird quantum
fact that had only been recently discovered.
Unable to get any closer, the electrons in degenerate matter exert a powerful outward
pressure - electron degeneracy pressure.
Fowler’s finding solved a great mystery of the time.
A new type of star had been discovered - white dwarfs.
These faint but searing-hot stars appeared to have densities so high that a single cubic
centimeter of their material weighed a literal ton.
Fowler realized they could be composed of his degenerate matter, and that degeneracy
pressure alone would be enough to stop them from collapsing under their own intense gravitational
field.
It had become clear that this must be the Sun’s ultimate fate.
Once its nuclear fuel supply runs out, there would be no outward flow of energy to resist
the gravitational crush.
Its core would collapse until halted by electron degeneracy pressure.
Meanwhile the outer layers would have been ejected, leaving its exposed core as the white
dwarf.
Most eminent physicists of the era were coming to believe that the white dwarf should
be the fate of all stars.
Chandrasekhar, pondering the problem on the SS Pilsna, realized that the most eminent
physicists were wrong.
He realized that, while Fowler’s calculations for the state of the degenerate plasma were
brilliant, they were also incomplete.
They failed to incorporate the effects of Albert Einstein’s relativity theory, which
predicted that the world looks very different to things traveling close to the speed of
light.
And in the extreme density of a white dwarf, electrons would indeed be traveling fast enough
for relativity to change the physics.
Chandra redid Fowler’s calculation and discovered something wild.
Although this degeneracy pressure could support a dead star up to a point - if that stellar
remnant’s mass was too high then a new process would take over.
The star’s own electrons would be driven into its nuclei in a process called electron
capture.
And fewer electrons means less electron degeneracy pressure, which means the star begins to collapse,
which means more electrons driven into nuclei, and so in in a runaway process.
We now know that the end result is either a neutron star or a black hole, accompanied
by a powerful supernova explosion.
But on the SS Pilsner,
Chandra just knew that no white dwarf could exist above that mass limit - what we
now call the Chandrasekhar limit. For the stellar core left behind by an ordinary star
that should be 1.44 times the mass of the Sun.
Not a bad start to graduate school - showing up on your professor’s doorstep having already
improved one of your prof’s major life achievements.
Okay, let’s fast forward our story just a little bit - to the very long, boring future of a stellar
remnant below the Chandrasekhar limit.
They start out hot and bright, but with no capacity to generate new energy, they slowly
radiate away the heat of their youth.
As they cool, the once-searing plasma changes state.
It freezes.
The star crystalizes.
In regular crystals, atoms or molecules are bonded into a lattice by sharing their electrons.
In a white dwarf, the nuclei can never recapture their electrons to become atoms again.
The electrons remain as a hot, degenerate plasma and continue their work of keeping
the star from collapsing.
Meanwhile the nuclei stop interacting with the electrons and slow down as they cool.
They become almost motionless within the star, and slip into a regular grid pattern.
Eventually, all white dwarfs must cool to the temperature of the ambient space - now a frigid
3 Kelvin, but in the future even colder than that as the universe expands and the cosmic background
radiation disperses.
Eventually, all white dwarf must fade to near-invisible nuggets we call black dwarfs.
To continue our story from here we need to enter an entirely new temporal regime.
Deep inside the crystalized black dwarf that our Sun will become, a single carbon or oxygen nucleus
has been sitting neatly in its assigned column and row for many times the age of the universe.
Suddenly it’ll find itself one row over - teleported due to fundamental quantum uncertainty
in its position.
This quantum tunneling lands the nucleus close enough to its neighbor that the two fuse into
a heavier element.
This process is called pycnonuclear fusion - and it will very VERY slowly convert the
Sun’s core from carbon into the most stable form of matter - iron - over around 10^1500
years.
The result is an iron star - or an iron black dwarf - the hypothetical fate of all stars
whose cores are beneath the Chandrasekhar limit.
I should add here that there’s an alternative ending.
All of this depends on protons themselves being fundamentally stable.
If protons can decay, then the entire white dwarf will vaporize into a subatomic mist
in a mere 10^32 or so years, long before it could become an iron star.
But assuming protons are stable, we’ll reach a point where the universe consists of only
iron stars and radiation.
And those iron stars are also doomed - they’ll quietly become black holes themselves through countless
aeons of more quantum tunneling - something like 10^10^75 years.
And those black hole will evaporate rather quickly by comparison - leaking away as pure
radiation in 10^60 years.
This absurdly long and dull future may have been given a little more sparkle.
Matt Caplan, in a paper published in August this year, has found a way for some of these
iron stars to end on a brighter note - as black dwarf supernovae.
Remember that the Chandresekhar limit gives the largest mass possible for a stellar remnant
to be supported by this pressure.
It depends on the number of electrons relative to the mass of the star.
But Caplan performed a detailed analysis of the nuclear reactions that lead to an iron
star, and found that the delicate balance is threatened.
In the last stage of the pycnonuclear fusion process, two silicon nuclei fuse to produce
nickel, and then one of the nickel’s protons emits a positron to become a neutron.
The result is iron-56 - the most stable element in the universe.
But that emitted positron is the antimatter counterpart of the electrons that are supporting
the star from the collapse.
It immediately annihilates with one of those electrons, depleting the star’s supply.
By the time the iron star is fully formed, its Chandresekhar mass has dropped from around
1.44 to less than 1.2.
times the Sun’s mass.
That means that a white dwarf - or now iron black dwarf - that was initially stable with
a mass below the original Chandrasekhar limit could become unstable if it’s mass is greater
than 1.16 solar masses.
When that happens, catastrophic collapse should result in a new type of supernova that will
only happen in that distant future - a black dwarf supernova.
They’ll leave behind smaller iron cores or a neutron stars.
For the largest such stars, you should expect the first explosions to begin in 10^1100 years
or so, while those at the lower limit will take up to 10^32000 years to pop.
And the remnants of our solar system get to see all of this - our Sun stays a black
dwarf - probably of crystalized iron - through all of this.
I know this is a relief to many of you - the prospect of an anticlimactic end of time weighed
on my mind also.
But we can rest a little easier - there’ll be at least one more interesting thing to
look forward to - Iron stars exploding in unimaginably distant future of space time.
We couldn’t do this show without the amazing support of all of you.
And we couldn’t have confidence that we’ll KEEP doing it with the generosity of our Patreon
supporters - even a couple of bucks a month helps keep the lights on, the camera rolling,
and the green screen .. green.
Today I want to give a special thanks to Sean Maddox, who supports us at the Big Bang level.
Sean, we’ve decided to dedicate all 10^3600 years of black dwarf supernovae across the
entire end of the universe as a barely-adequate fireworks celebration of your generous help.
And if it turns out that black dwarf supernovae don’t actually exist - well, I can assure
you that our gratitude still does.
So, thank you.
In the last episode we did one of our more "woah dude" topics yet - Why do we remember
the past and not the future?
In other words, how does our psychological sense of the arrow of time arise when the
laws of physics don't seem to care about the direction of time.
Ultimately it's connected to the second law of thermodynamics, which people keep commenting
sounds like the sycamore of thermodynamics.
That episode explored that connection - memory can be thought of as resulting from the increase
in correlations between your brain - or any patch of space - and both the surrounding
universe and the past.
In the comments, Kevin Mathewson put it very succinctly, so I'm just going to read Kevin's
comment.
"You could say the forwardness of memory is a spatial phenomenon.
When you look at the whole universe at once, it can be said to remember its future.
A future collision between two objects is "remembered" by their current movement toward
each other.
The problem arises when we zoom in on only a portion of the universe.
The information of a future collision is spread out, spatially, before the collision: to "remember"
the future collision you have to know the present trajectories of these two far-apart
objects.
After the collision, you can find information about that collision recorded in each of the
objects.
The information has been smeared across both locations, so you no longer need to look at
them both."
So there you have it - the universe remembers both past and future perfectly, but individual
chunks of the universe only remember in the direction in which correlations are increasing.
Some people thought the whole idea might be either trivial or circular - we remember the
past because it has happened.
The point here is that even the idea of "it has happened" is a relative concept - relative
to the observer.
And WE observers ride the wave of time in a particular direction.
If correlations grew in the opposite direction - the wave flowed backwards, our definition
of future and past would flip.
John Ring correctly summarizes that observers in a reverse-time universe wouldn't know the
difference.
To quote: even if time did flow backwards, from future to past, in each time step we
would not remember the "previous" one (the future) because we have no memory of it, and
we would instead remember the "next" one (the past) because we have memories encoded of
it.
So that's it - if we think of time as just a stack of slices of the block universe, a
prefered direction of time only emerges in our instantaneous awareness of the states
of block slices in one or the other direction.
Chris Becke asks how the double slit experiment works if analyzed backwards.
I'm glad you asked, Chris.
This one depends entirely on your choice of interpretation of quantum mechanics.
In the Copenhagen interpretation, you CANNOT reverse time in the double slit experiment,
because after the measurement of particle position is made, the state of the wavefunction
before that measurement is lost.
You can't recover it.
In the many worlds interpretation the wavefunction persists, so reversing time means reversing
all outcomes of the experiment - all possible worlds, and watching them converge rather
than split.
Clearnightsky is a time-reversed observer from a Many Worlds multiverse, and complains
they actually can remember the future, but unfortunately can't decide which of the futures
is the real one.
I'm afraid all of them are - you're remembering the many real branches of your future-slash-past.
It's a many branching tree a QuantElm Tree if you will - possibly related to the Sycamore of thermodynamics.