Big Freeze or Heat Death
Under this scenario, the universe eventually reaches a state of maximum entropy in which everything is evenly distributed and there are no energy gradients—which are needed to sustain information processing, one form of which is life.
This scenario has gained ground as the most likely fate..
Cosmology is as old as humankind.
Once primitive socal groups developed language, it was a short step to making their first attempts to understand the world around them.
Very early cosmology, from Neolithic times of 20,000 to 100,000 years ago, was extremely local..
Explanation.
The Lambda-CDM concordance model describes the evolution of the universe from a very uniform, hot, dense primordial state to its present state over a span of about 13.77 billion years of cosmological time..
The chronology of the universe describes the history and future of the universe according to Big Bang cosmology.
Research published in 2015 estimates the earliest stages of the universe's existence as taking place 13.8 billion years ago, with an uncertainty of around 21 million years at the 68% confidence level..
For now, Cosmic Time is defined as the period from the origin of the known universe (the "Big Bang") to the present, a period of some 13.7 billion years (or 137 geons), and is considered to extend an indefinite but finite number of gigayears into the future..
The Cosmic Calendar is a scale in which the 13.7 billion year lifetime of the universe is mapped onto a single year.
This image helps to put cosmology, evolution, and written history in context.
At this scale the Big Bang took place on January 1 at midnight, and the current time is mapped to December 31 at midnight..
Big Bang nucleosynthesis
Events in the universe can be ordered according to a “cosmic time,” which corresponds to time as measured by a particular class of fundamental observers since the “big bang.” Many questions that remain unanswered seem to be answerable by empirical methods, if only in principle..
Topics referred to by the same term
