The universe will die. Eventually it will become nothing. In roughly a quadrillion years, a last star will give its last twinkle, and black holes will devour everything before they completely evaporate. And in a googol years (that’s 10 to the hundredth power, which is a lot), the universe will be empty.

New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth’s axis was approaching higher values.

� The last of the ice ages in human experience (often referred to as the Ice Age) reached its maximum roughly 20,000 years ago, and then gave way to warming. Sea level rose in two major steps, one centered near 14,000 years and the other near 11,500 years.

Key points: The last ice age was 12,000 years ago. The onset of an ice age is related to changes in the Earth’s tilt and orbit. The Earth is due for another ice age now but climate change makes it very unlikely.

Earth will not be able to support and sustain life forever. Our oxygen-rich atmosphere may only last another billion years, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience. As our Sun ages, it is becoming more luminous, meaning that in the future Earth will receive more solar energy.

All plant and animal life on Earth need oxygen to survive. According to a new study, a billion years from now, Earth’s oxygen will become depleted in a span of about 10,000 years, bringing about worldwide extinction for all except microbes.

According to the new study, the atmosphere will run out of oxygen in about one billion years. The planet will then resemble the so-called Archaen period about 2.8 billion years ago when there was no oxygen gas on Earth – a time before the so-called Great Oxidation Event.

All plants would die and, eventually, all animals that rely on plants for food — including humans — would die, too. While some inventive humans might be able to survive on a Sun-less Earth for several days, months, or even years, life without the Sun would eventually prove to be impossible to maintain on Earth.

In about 5.5 billion years the Sun will run out of hydrogen and begin expanding as it burns helium. It will swap from being a yellow giant to a red giant, expanding beyond the orbit of Mars and vaporizing Earth—including the atoms that make-up you.

In order to save the Sun, to help it last longer than the 5 billion years it has remaining, we would need some way to stir up the Sun with a gigantic mixing spoon. To get that unburned hydrogen from the radiative and convective zones down into the core. One idea is that you could crash another star into the Sun.

What does death mean, for the sun? It means our sun will run out of fuel in its interior. It’ll cease the internal thermonuclear reactions that enable stars to shine. It’ll swell into a red giant, whose outer layers will engulf Mercury and Venus and likely reach the Earth.

This is the surface of the sun we see every day. But if you take a look around, there’s nothing here for you to actually land on, because the sun doesn’t have any solid surface to speak of. It’s just a giant ball of hydrogen and helium gas. So instead of landing on the photosphere, you’re going to sink into it.

It is the pull of the Moon’s gravity on the Earth that holds our planet in place. Without the Moon stabilising our tilt, it is possible that the Earth’s tilt could vary wildly. It would move from no tilt (which means no seasons) to a large tilt (which means extreme weather and even ice ages).

At the Equator, the earth’s rotational motion is at its fastest, about a thousand miles an hour. If that motion suddenly stopped, the momentum would send things flying eastward. Moving rocks and oceans would trigger earthquakes and tsunamis. The still-moving atmosphere would scour landscapes.

If the moon were half its mass, then the ocean tides would have been correspondingly smaller and imparted less energy to it. Weaker tides (of a half moon) would also have caused less erosion of Earth’s landmasses over the past few billion years—and the continents’ shorelines would likely look quite different for it.

If the Moon fell into the Earth the collision would break the Earth immediately into large chunks as it joined with and merged with the moon. The magma released would cause a firestorm that would engulf the Earth extinguishing all life, boil the oceans and change the angle of our axis changing the spin.