AaS! 220: Will Our Universe End in a Big Rip?

Ask a Spaceman!

Paul M. Sutter

Astrophysics, Science, Cosmos, Holes, Black, Astronomy, Natural Sciences, Universe, Cosmology, Space, Physics

4.8 • 853 Ratings

🗓️ 19 March 2024

⏱️ 40 minutes

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Summary

How can a “big rip” tear the universe apart? What does that mean for existence itself? Is it going to happen, and what are we doing to find out? I discuss these questions and more in today’s Ask a Spaceman!

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Transcript

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0:00.0	What are we supposed to do when nature is telling us that something is happening that should be impossible?
0:15.7	And I mean outright impossible, not just weird or strange or unexpected, and I don't mean nature telling us, as in the evidence is shaky or contradictory or circumstantial, like something your best friends, cousins,
0:27.9	former roommates.
0:28.8	And no, I'm talking about decades of work.
0:31.2	Using the most sophisticated tools, the most advanced statistics, a combination of different measurements, all leading to the conclusion
0:37.9	that the universe might just be doing something utterly impossible. And no, I'm not talking
0:45.4	about dark matter. Dark matter is weird and mysterious for sure, but it's not impossible.
0:52.8	To explain dark matter, you just need new ingredients
0:55.2	in the universe that don't interact with light. And we know of lots of those kinds of particles
0:59.7	already, so that's like kind of no big deal, except we don't know what dark matter is, but that's
1:03.4	a different episode. And no, I'm not talking about dark energy either, at least not at first.
1:10.2	Dark energy is just the name we give to the accelerated
1:13.4	expansion of the universe, which is weird and mysterious, but not outright impossible. It's
1:21.1	perfectly allowed in the equations of general relativity to have accelerated expansion. So it's fine.
1:29.4	Everything we know about physics is compatible with the existence of dark matter and dark energy. But as we make ever more careful
1:35.9	measurements of dark energy, we keep running into this impossibility. And the possibility of it, and I will stress that at this stage, it's only a
1:47.2	possibility that this effect is real. We have the possibility that dark energy is doing something
1:53.2	impossible. It's possibly impossible. I like that. Okay. Before we dig into the possibly impossible thing, the thing that shouldn't be happening
2:05.4	but just might actually be happening, we need to go over the measurement. We need to talk about
2:10.9	how we measure this. How do we even know what it is we're talking about? How do we go about
2:16.2	measuring something like dark energy
2:18.1	and getting a handle on it? I mean, I need to start off with a statement that we have no idea
	...

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