Travel through time from the moment of the "Big Bang," before time and space separated, to a dark, starless universe over 10¹⁰⁰ years from now when individual atoms can be larger than our galaxy.

University of Michigan physicist Fred Adams and NASA astronomer Greg Laughlin offer a guided tour on how stars live and die, and expand the scale to include galaxies and the universe as a whole. Adams and Laughlin make it easy to take the imaginative leaps of space and time, from quarks in the early universe, to nucleosynthesis inside stars, the evaporation of galaxies, and the decay of black holes in the distant future.

• Understand some basic components of the quantum universe and the stellar universe.
• Compare the primary characteristics of each era of the universe.
• Describe when and how the sun will die.
• Understand the importance of red dwarfs and brown dwarfs in the future.
• Discover how stellar remnants--white dwarfs, neutron stars, and black holes--carry on the tradition of stellar evolution after the demise of ordinary stars.
• Evaluate other possibilities for the future of the universe.

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