Doesn't this have pretty big implications for our understanding of the universe and what came before/comes after?
Does this mean the whole heat death of the universe might take much longer than previously thought? I don't have a great physics understanding but it seems like it would be a lot slower for everything to turn to energy if there's atoms with so much longevity.
We've known about it for a while but because it's very very rare it has never really been observed until now.
Heat death was already going to take an absurdly long amount of time, so this probably wouldn't have much of an impact on estimates. I'm no physicist though so I'm just making an educated guess. The heat death is more of a process than an absolute end, anyway, as the process of heat death will slow down the closer we get to heat death, essentially meaning you'd need infinite time for a truly dead universe. I guess it's like diminishing returns and is why a bowl of hot water will take longer and longer to cool down the cooler it gets.
Brain Cox talked about heat death of the universe in one of his 'Wonders' documentaries. I believe he said it'd take more years than there are atoms in the entire universe, which is just absolutely bananas
How do you even measure something like that? Surely that's long enough to call stable? That's a completely unimaginable number.
Does that mean even the most stable of atoms just turn into grey quantum soup given infinite time? That's scary to think about.
One sextillion is 10^21. The heat death of the universe is proposed to occur at around 10^100 years.
The big rip is probably going to happen long before then anyways.
Also god damn, that is one STABLE atom.
I'm no expert but I don't see how it would?
to be fair i doubt anyone'll be waiting that long to prove them wrong
Yeah I realized that after lord fear said we knew about it for a long time, for some reason I mistook measuring it for it being new, and connected it to my layman understanding of what heat death is.
now what bloodline is willing to wait to confirm the accuracy of that number
Only one nuclear-decay process in the universe has a longer half-life:
the decay of tellurium-128, which has a half-life more than 100 times
longer than that of xenon-124. But this vanishingly rare event has only
been calculated on paper.
That's 2.2×10^24 (2.2 septillion)
Unless the proton decays, that is.
Does that mean facepunch eventually dies?
I don't want you guys or this place to die
It is the main question in The Big Freeze.
Turns out we can't answer it yet, we don't know if the proton will truly stay stable forever or live long enough until a certain point where time becomes meaningless.
There is an estimation of a minimum of 10^32 years. Which can greatly vary since the proton decay also affects and is affected depending of the hypothetical end(s) of the universe.
Not if you play Cookie Clicker.
I wouldn't worry about life in universe ending apocalypses. We'd either find out how to make a new universe or fix this one if we had trillions of years on our side. If not well then thats what the penrose process is for.
I'd be more scared of something like another big bang more than the heat death of the universe.
brb rerolling as a xenon based lifeform
idk if I'd even want to live for 1000 years, much less 16 sextillion.
I'll stick with carbon which is mostly carbon-12 and stable. Though I'd miss out on the ability to emit neutrinos every 10 or so years.
Wow those are, like, cookie clicker numbers.
fucking beat me to it
no, but it does help models of atomic interaction and decay
By minimising background radiation as much as possible and thoroughly accounting for all possible remaining sources. This is the paper (paywalled) describing the detection of two-neutrino double electron capture (2νECEC) in Xe-124, and this Reddit comment explains the whole experiment very well, although there should be a correction: the liquid xenon used is not isotopically pure Xe-124, but rather natural abundance xenon, which contains about 0.1% Xe-124. A total of 177.7 days worth of observations were included in the final data analysis, and 126±29 2νECEC events were recorded from the 1.5 t volume. To give an idea of the scales involved, that 1.5 t volume contained 11420 moles of xenon, which corresponded to 11.36 moles of Xe-124, or 6.839×10^24 atoms of Xe-124. That's 6.839 trillion trillion atoms of Xe-124.
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