Not with a bang but with a whimper

摘要

The mammoth black holes at the centre of most galaxies may be pushing the universe closer to its final fade-out. And it is all down to the raging disorder within those dark powerhouses.rnDisorder is measured by a quantity called entropy, something which has been on the rise ever since the big bang. Chas Egan and Charles Lineweaver of the Australian National University in Canberra used the latest astrophysical data to calculate the total entropy of everything in the universe, from gas to gravitons. It turns out that supermassive black holes are by far the biggest contributors to the universe's entropy. Entropy reflects the number of possible arrangements of matter and energy in an object. The number of different configurations of matter a black hole could contain is staggering because its internal state is completely mysterious.