Ragnarok: Eventual Doom Of The Universe

I am sure many of you must have heard the saying "Everything comes to an end". The fittest of people,stable and technologically advanced civilizations, trees, animals and every other thing in the Universe including stars, planets or even an asteroid roaming around in free space can't stand the test of time. But what about the Universe, can it come to an end? The infinite container that contains everything we know and don't know, every living and non living thing, every Atom we can or cannot recognise, can it come to an end?

Scientist or to be more specific astrophysicists have wondered how the end of the universe would look like if there was any. However, due to the vastness of the universe it is difficult to understand the working of it especially when we are trapped in the confines of an average sized planet revolving around a relatively average star. Still scientists did come up with a mathematical formula which reduced the ending of our universe in three possible endings. Let's journey through these cases and observe how the universe comes to an end.

CASE 1: THE BIG CRUNCH
The most widely accepted theory is of the 'Big Crunch'. It it widely accepted as it follows one of the key concepts of physics, THE LAW OF SYMMETRY OR PATTERNS. The universe can be extremely random and beautiful mix of chaos but it often this chaos when observed closely follows a pattern. The Big crunch is said to be the exact reverse of the Big Bang theory. It says that eventually all the other forces( electrostatic, magnetic, nuclear etc) will die out and the only force present would be Gravity, it will pull everything in a certain direction combining all the spacial bodies into one until its a small point of infinite density, This point is known as the singularity. Notice how this theory is the exact opposite of the big bang theory and is the best ending we could hope for, as from the singularity formed a new universe can be created and hence a cycle of life and death for the universe can be predicted.

CASE 2: THE BIG RIP
An Astrophysicist known as Edwin Hubble once observed that nearby galaxies were moving away from us at an accelerated pace, after a lot of repeated and matching observations of different galaxies by different observers, it was concluded that the universe was expanding at an accelerated pace and it keeps getting bigger as each second paces by faster than ever.

Astrophysics couldn't explain this phenomenon, what was causing the expansion of the universe? There has to be some kind of energy being provided which is causing this acceleration, why can't be trace or see what this energy is? Scientists have tried but failed to understand what causes this expansion but they did come up with a name of the energy responsible DARK ENERGY.

If our universe if expanding faster than ever due to Dark Energy then there will be a time when it's the only dominant force in the Universe, Dark energy will overcome Gravity and electrostatic forces which keep atoms together. When this happens the universe and everything in it will rip into shread, atoms will be separated then torn apart into such small sections that no more splitting is possible. It will be an abrupt and sudden end of everything we know. With the Big Rip we will not know if there will be another universe formed, Imagine we are a painting then the universe is the canvas on which we exist, the Big Rip will rip apart the canvas into small unrecognisation pieces.

CASE 3: THE COLD DEATH
We have seen two contrasting endings so far, this is somewhat in the middle. This theory takes both Dark energy and the other forces into account and states that one day there will be a situation where all the forces will perfectly cancel each other out and the universe will come to a stand still.

If such a situation arrives the universe would live a long live however would die a cold death, as all the stars present eventually die all the planets absorbed, black holes depleted by release of radiation ( hawking radiation) in the end there is no heat for atoms to function everything would seize to exist at such low temperatures.

These were the possible endings of our universe, however I wouldnt be concerned about any of these situations as Scientists don't see any of these events unfold for billions of years and we would be long gone till that day arrives or will we?