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Earth and humanity

On that third , watery world , between 3.8 and 3.5 billion year ago ( bet on whom you ask ) , tiny , simple microbe wink into existence . These life sentence - contour emerged and evolved into wondrous ocean monsters and mammoth , leafage - eating dinosaur . finally , about 200,000 years ago , along come upright wight capable of marveling at our mysterious universe and discovering how the whole thing came to be .

The end (or not?)

Of course , that is n’t the end of things . Physicists still do n’t quite know what ’s in store for the universe . That depends on the details of saturnine energy , a still - cryptical force out driving apart the cosmos and whose properties have not been well measured . In one potential future , the population will extend to expand incessantly , long enough that all the stars in all the wandflower will have run out of fuel , and even black pickle will evaporate into nothing , provide behind a utter macrocosm permeated by soggy free energy . Or , solemnity will eventually overcome dreary energy ’s expansionary force , pull all thing back together in a sort of reverse Big Bang get it on as the Big Crunch . Alternatively , dark-skinned energy could speed everything apart further and farther from everything else , creating what ’s known as the Big Rip , in which the cosmos literally tear itself apart .

the big bang

the big bang

On the left is part of a new half-sky image in which three wavelengths of light have been combined to highlight the Milky Way (purple) and cosmic microwave background (gray). On the right, a closeup of the Orion Nebula.

The Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument maps the night sky from the Nicholas U. Mayall 4-meter Telescope in Arizona.

An image of a star shedding layers of gas at the end of its life and leaving a white dwarf behind.

An image of a distant galaxy with a zoomed-in inset

a photo of a very large orange galaxy next to other smaller galaxies

An image of a spiral galaxy with blue and orange colors

Stars orbiting close to the Sagittarius A* black hole at the center of the Milky Way captured in May this year.

big bang, expansion of the universe.

The Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer in orbit

An illustration of a wormhole.

An artist�s impression of what a massive galaxy in the early universe might look like. The explosive formation of many stars lights up the gas surrounding the galaxy.

An artist�s depiction of simulations used in the research.

An image comparing the relative sizes of our solar system�s known dwarf planets, including the newly discovered 2017 OF201

a person holds a GLP-1 injector

A man with light skin and dark hair and beard leans back in a wooden boat, rowing with oars into the sea

an MRI scan of a brain

A photograph of two of Colossal�s genetically engineered wolves as pups.

an abstract image of intersecting lasers