The Fate of the Universe

Today I spent the day at the Northeast Astronomy Forum in Rockland County. It is a big astronomy convention with telescope and equipment displays, and lectures on astronomy with well known speakers including an astronaut and professional astronomers. This is Dr. Neta Bahcall, of Princeton University. Her topic was "The Dark Side of the Universe," which has to do with what the universe is made of. Something called "dark matter" may make up, believe it or not, 96 percent of the Universe. Earth, and the Sun and all the planets, all the stars we see, and galaxies, and gaseous nebulae only amount to 4 percent of the material in the cosmos! Astronomers pretty much know now the fate of the universe. It started expanding at the time of the "Big Bang" and is now expected to expand indefinitely, as it gets larger, and more sparse, and darker and colder, until the last stars blink out. Not to worry, that will take billions of years. We'll be lucky the way we are going, if Earth lasts three more generations.