Abstract
Will the universe continue to expand forever, or will it eventually halt and start to collapse?
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
In this chapter we assume that there is no cosmological constant in the universe. We will revisit the fate of the universe later when we discover evidence that the cosmological constant is not zero.
- 2.
The zero subscripts of \(H_{0}\) and \(\rho_{0}\) indicate the values of H and \(\rho\) measured at the present cosmic time.
- 3.
This is not just a lucky coincidence. Newtonian gravity is a good approximation to GR when (1) the gravitational field is weak and (2) the velocities are small compared to the speed of light. Are these conditions satisfied in our calculation? When the radius of the sphere R is sufficiently small, they are. Since R is an arbitrary parameter in our calculation, we can choose it to be small enough to ensure that the Newtonian approximation is indeed valid.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 Springer International Publishing AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Perlov, D., Vilenkin, A. (2017). The Fate of the Universe. In: Cosmology for the Curious. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57040-2_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-57040-2_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-57038-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-57040-2
eBook Packages: Physics and AstronomyPhysics and Astronomy (R0)