Author's Examples

In their paper, the authors consider a hypothetical example with w = −1.5, H₀ = 70 km/s/Mpc, and Ω_m = 0.3, in which case the Big Rip will happen approximately 22 billion years from the present.

For w = −1.5, the galaxies would first be separated from each other. About 60 million years before the Big Rip, gravity would be too weak to hold the Milky Wayand other individual galaxies together. Galaxies would be destroyed as stars separate from the main black hole. Approximately three months before the Big Rip, the Solar System (or systems similar to our own at this time, as the fate of the Solar System 22 billion years in the future is questionable) would be gravitationally unbound. Planets would be detached from the star’s orbit. In the last minutes, stars and planets would be torn apart, and an extremely short amount of time before the Big Rip, atoms would be destroyed. At the time the Big Rip occurs, even spacetime itself will be ripped apart and the scale factor will be infinity.^[2]