The Big Rip - Our Universe Torn To Shreds And The Birth Of A New Universe

You look up into the night sky and everything looks static but this is a false impression. The stars are moving but the distances are so vast that their apparent motion appears to be very slow.

Looking even further with the aid of telescopes you see that there are galaxies upon galaxies going out into the distance. Some of the nearest ones ("nearest" is a relative term here) are measured to be moving towards us and some are moving away from us (as measured by their redshifts).

Looking even further than our local galactic neighbourhood it is found that galaxies are all moving away from us. The further away the galaxy is the faster it is moving away from us. Edwin Hubble discovered the phenomenon that redshift increases with distance in 1929.

The interpretation is that the spacetime of the Universe itself is expanding and dragging the galaxies away from each other (us included, we do not occupy a special place in all of this). At large enough distances the effect becomes large to overwhelm the individual velocities of the galaxies themselves such eventually that they all look to be moving away.

It Gets Weirder

In the late 1990's the High-Z Supernova Search Team as well as the Supernova Cosmology Project published evidence that not only is the Universe expanding but that the expansion rate is increasing.

This is a remarkable finding and if true leads to some interesting speculations when you start thinking about it.

The "Big Rip"

So the spacetime of the Universe is expanding and the expansion rate is increasing. If that expansion rate keeps accelerating on and on through time this leads one to reach a few conclusions.

The Galaxies Themselves Will Be Ripped Apart: Gravity is an attractive force, every bit of matter is attracting every other bit of matter to itself and this is how the galaxies, which are all rotating, manage to hang together despite the centripetal forces trying to tear them apart.

Enter the Big Rip: will the rate of expansion of spacetime ever become large enough to pull the galaxies and star clusters apart? Eventually this means that we will only be left with individual star systems and their planets.

Star Systems Will Be Ripped Apart: Going further in time and even further along into the Big Rip. Will the acceleration of spacetime expansion rate ever become large enough to rip even solar systems apart, pulling planets away from their parent stars?

Planets and Stars Will Be Ripped Apart: By now you know where this is going. Will the effect of the Big Rip even become large enough to overcome the gravity holding the planets and stars together and pull them apart into their individual molecules and atoms?

Molecules and Atoms Will Be Ripped Apart: The logical continuation here is to assume that the Big Rip could become large enough to overcome even the electromagnetic forces holding molecules and even atom themselves apart.

What Happens to The Subatomic Particles?

Let's continue on. The galaxies are gone, so are star systems, stars, planets and even molecules and atoms.

The Universe is now just filled with subatomic particles that are very very widely spaced apart from each other.

Now imagine that the Rip continues to gain strength. As far as I understand it you cannot split subatomic particles like electrons or quarks. So what will happen?

Will this mean that energy will be dumped into the individual particles and that this energy will be enough to spawn new particles according to mass-energy equivalence principle? (i.e. E = mc²). The lonely isolated particles will thus generate new particles only to have them ripped away a moment later? Again and again.

New Universes?

Carry this process on one final step. Imagine that the energy dumped into these subatomic particles is so large, so mindbogglingly vast that more than just extra particles are spawned. What if the energy dumped into a subatomic particle becomes large enough to spawn a new Universe? It seems to me that this could be a logical endpoint for a hypothesis such as the Big Rip.

Well, I looked but I could not find a source for this very weird and speculative thought so that's really enough for now. If you know of a corroborating or refuting reference please post it in the comments section below.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

That was fun, as well as being very speculative and all very "science-fictiony" but the reality is that this field of study is still quite new and the uncertainties in the data are large enough such that the actual end result will likely be more mundane and probably closer to some type of heat death scenario.

Closing Words

I did not even get into the speculation as to where all the energy to get an entire Universe to accelerate is coming from. That is a topic unto itself and might be a good source material for a future post.

In the meantime it would be best to just enjoy the stars, sunsets, coffee, beer and hot chocolate and wait for this ever evolving field of astronomy to refine their measurements and theories. I would bet that the eventual truth will be somewhere a lot less radical than the current wild speculations.

Thanks for reading my post.

Post Sources

What Is The Big Rip? by Astronomic.
Big Rip - Wikipedia article
Dark Energy - Wikipedia article
Future of an Expanding Universe - Wikipedia article
Supernova Cosmology Project - Wikipedia article
High-Z Supernova Team - Wikipedia article
Heat Death of the Universe - Wikipedia article
Redshift - Wikipedia article
Redshift Increases With Distance - Wikipedia article

Image Sources

img001: Author: NASA/WMAP Science Team, original version: NASA; modified by Ryan Kaldari. Link. License: public domain.
img002: Author: NASA/SDO (AIA). Link. License: public domain.
img003: Author: Jtneill. Link. License: public domain.