Exoplanets Spotted Orbiting Dead Star

Five billion years from now... oh fuck it, I need a drink.

Sobering up now, this "dead star" is really a white dwarf, isn't it?
Time scales become truly mind-boggling when, after eons as a white dwarf, the nuclear reaction peters out, the "ember" still emitting heat for eons upon eons.

If the proton decays, when the last white dwarf goes out, around 10^14 years from now, the Universe passes from the Stelliferous Era to the Degenerate Era, everything slowly cooling down, matter slowly disintegrating or being sucked into black holes, beyond the point when all free-floating matter has reached 1-to-1 odds of evaporating, roughly 10^40 years from now.

If the proton decays, then the Universe enters the Black Hole Era, when there is no more matter to be sucked into singularities, so that they now begin the excruciatingly slow process of evaporating via Hawking Radiation. The last of the supermassive black holes will have evaporated by 10^100 from now. Then we enter a period of virtual infinity, named the Dark Era, the Universe inconceivably vast and empty and still accelerating.

However, if the proton does NOT decay, circumstances and numbers become even more surreal/nasty, all stars NOT sucked into black holes reach 1-to-1 odds of becoming iron spheres at around 10^1500 years from now. That's right, all baryonic matter in the Universe will have frozen into an iron state. Finally, the last iron star will collapse into a neutron star or black hole at 10^10^76 (ten to the ten to the seventy six).

And that's how thing will end and remain ended.

Source: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdotScience/~3/uyWNuloPpZM/exoplanets-spotted-orbiting-dead-star

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