As stars disappear, we will be left in the dark

COSMOLOGY:WE HAVE a miserable future ahead of us unfortunately. Stars in distant galaxies will begin to wink out one by one, leaving us sitting alone in our own Milky Way galaxy more or less in the dark.

Mind you, we won’t have to watch this ourselves. It won’t happen for somewhere between 100 billion and 1,000 billion years from now, according to Prof Lawrence Krauss, director of the origins initiative at Arizona State University.

Prof Krauss took a light-hearted but decidedly bleak view of where cosmology was going and decided that most of the news was pretty bad. “The good thing about the universe is no matter how bad it is, it is going to get worse,” he told a session on the closing day of the AAAS meeting in Chicago.

The science of cosmology had made great strides over the past few decades with a good match-up between theory and observation, particularly in the area of cosmic inflation. This theory explained the expansion of the universe after the Big Bang and closely matched astronomical evidence, he said.

“Our picture of the universe has changed completely but at the same time we are on the threshold of answering questions that a generation ago we never would have even imagined were testable.”

The scientist who proposed inflation, Prof Alan Guth of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, described cosmological theories such as the notion of multiple invisible universes and the possibility – happily remote – that our universe could collide with one of them.

The theories indicate that there should be many universes “without limit” hidden from us. “I would be happier if this would all go away,” he admitted.

Dr Scott Dodelson of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory in Illinois refused to get bogged down by the contradictions within the theories. “We are making this stuff up,” he argued. “You can play tennis without a net for only so long until people call you up.”

If one could travel 100 billion years into the future, the sky would look very different. “Everything in the universe will disappear before our eyes,” Prof Krauss said. At that point a cosmologist trying to understand the universe would probably take the view held by scientists in 1900, that we lived in a solitary galaxy lost on its own in the vastness of the cosmos.