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Apparently, the universe will reach heat death in the extremely far future, after the last black holes would have evaporated. Even more, it is possible that all objects in the universe will turn into black holed via quantum tunneling 1 2 3, so at the end nothing will remain in the universe except for residual thermal radiation in thermodynamic equilibrium

But, even if objects in extremely long timescales would quantum tunnel into black holes by quantum fluctuations, could there be also some quantum fluctuations that would make new particles to form (using the energy "leftovers" of the universe after heat death)? Or because energy (like electromagnetic radiation) will be redshifted, there will be a point where this would be impossible?

vengaq
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1 Answers1

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To make new particles out of radiation, that radiation has to be sufficiently energetic to account for the masses of the new particles. For example, 0.5 million electronvolt gamma rays can yield electron/antielectron pairs (and vice versa) but UV photons (~3 eV or so) cannot.

This means that once the background bath of leftover radiation (redshifted or not) in the heat death falls below the threshold required to produce the lightest possible particle, then there is no process available to do the trick and no new matter can be formed.

And that's why "heat death" is final.

niels nielsen
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