Studying Cosmology in the Year One Trillion

If astronomers will exist in the year one trillion, they will find it extremely difficult to conduct astrophysical and cosmological research, a team of experts believe. By that time, most of the guidelines we use for studying the Universe would have long-since disappeared.

As current observations indicate, the Cosmos is expanding at an ever-increasing rate, and there are no indications that this phenomenon is about to subside any time soon. What this means in practical terms is that galaxies are clumping up together in massive superclusters.

At the same time, these large-scale formations are flying away from each other, leaving massive voids of nothingness between them. Already, some of these holes are billions of light-years across, and their size is bound to increase with the passing eons.

One of the most commonly-used method of studying the Cosmos – analyzing the high redshift of extremely distant galaxies – will be rendered useless by these phenomena. Redshift is a process that affects light as a function of time.

The more distant an object is from Earth, the more its light is changed as seen from our vantage point. Blue light from a newborn star located billions of light-years away will slowly shift towards the redder portions of the visible-light spectrum.

Astronomers now use this measure to look at distant objects, and assess how far away they are from Earth. But, one trillion years from now, redshift studies will no longer be possible. By that time, even our closest galactic neighbors would have moved beyond the cosmological horizon due to expansion.

The radiation left over after the Big Bang exploded the Universe into being, called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), will be stretched to such an extent that it will become invisible too.

In a new scientific paper on the issue, Harvard-Smithsonan Center for Astrophysics (CfA) astronomers say that their future colleagues will only be able to study cosmology by studying stellar runaways from their own galaxy. These objects are part of a class called hypervelocity stars (HVS).

Outside the gravitational field of a galaxy, any acceleration a HVS would display would be the result of direct influences from the Hubble flow of the Universe, as in the rate at which it is expanding.

The vantage point astronomers will be using one trillion years from now would also be significantly different than it is today. The Milky Way will collide and merge with the Andromeda Galaxy some 5 billion years from now, giving birth to a supermassive spiral galaxy, Universe Today reports.