Degenerate life
Would life still exist during the Degenerate Era? It seems unlikely. According to Richard Pogge, astronomer at the Ohio State University, by the time stars exhaust their hydrogen fuel, life as we know it will be long gone.
“The universe will be burned-out and cold,” he says, “and it will just get colder over time.”
Aging stars and stellar remnants will result in most worlds being too frigid to support life. Planets in this era, long past being capable of supporting large organisms, will either be ejected from their orbits or spiral into the nearest degenerate stellar remnant. Or, as Pogge put it, “The remnant stars will either eat their children or throw them away.” This means, star systems as we think of them today will no longer exist.
Over the duration of the Degenerate Era, stellar remnants and even galaxies will undergo a series of collisions and near collisions. In our current era, these collisions often produce merged galaxies and encourage star formation. But during the Degenerate Era, this won’t happen.
Some merged, chaotic galaxies of discarded stellar corpses will still be able to form, but the lack of available free hydrogen will mean that new stars, by and large, won’t exist. In many cases, degenerate stellar remnants will simply be hurled into intergalactic space through near collisions, scattering them widely.
The final phase of the Degenerate Era will play out in an unexpected manner.
Matter trapped within dead stars literally will break apart, with neutrons decaying to protons, electrons, and antineutrinos. Protons themselves are hypothesized to have an extremely long half-life of approximately 1034 years, but as far as we know, that time is destined to come during the Degenerate Era, causing white dwarfs, brown dwarfs, and neutron stars to simply degrade and fade away.
“Eventually, the protons just dissolve,” Pogge says. At this point, the universe will be composed of copious free radiation, subatomic particles, and innumerable black holes. These black holes will be reign supreme during the following era, appropriately dubbed the Black Hole Era, which is a topic for another day.
While impossibly far off — and on some levels, deeply disturbing to think about — the Degenerate Era will one day come to pass. In Woody Allen’s iconic 1977 romantic comedy Annie Hall, a school-age version of Allen stops doing his homework after he reads in a newspaper that the universe is expanding, causing the character to ask his pediatrician, “What’s the point?”
You may sympathize with Allen's character. But the Degenerate Era is undoubtedly a fascinating topic to contemplate, especially considering just how unrecognizable the future cosmos will be compared to the already bizarre universe we know now.