the future evolution of large scale structure in an accelerating universe

click on the buttons below to watch the universe evolve from a third of its present age to 50 billion years in the future...

Science News Cover story! August 31, 2002 In the very distant future of a universe dominated by dark energy, the accelerating expansion of space stretches the 'cosmic web' of the present matter distribution (left inset) into a wispy remnant of its former self (backdrop). The far future is lonely: in a region a billion light-years in size where several thousand milky-way size galaxies now reside (left inset), only a handful will remain 50 billion years into the future (right inset).

Snapshots of the distribution of dark matter in the universe at 3 billion years old, today (14 billion years old), and 50 billion years in the future. The left panel shows how the cosmic web becomes increasingly well defined as the universe evolves. The dark energy accelerates the expansion of the universe; the picture in the lower corresponds to a region seventy times larger than the picture in the upper left. The right panel shows the evolution of a fixed physical region 300 million light years across. Only our immediate neighbors will be gravitationally bound to us in the far future; fewer and fewer objects will be visible from our Galaxy. And here's what Andrei Linde has to say about the future of the universe.

Michael Busha, Risa Wechsler, Fred Adams & Gus Evrard
University of Michigan Physics Department