Astrophysics

The initial conditions of our Universe can be summarized on a single sheet of paper. Yet the Universe is full of complex structures today, such as stars, galaxies and groups of galaxies. I will describe how complexity emerged in the form of the first stars out of the simple initial state of the Universe at early cosmic times. The future of the Universe is even more surprising. Over the past decade it was realized that the cosmic expansion has been accelerating. If this accelerated expansion will continue into the future, then within a hundred billion years there will be no galaxies left for us to observe within the cosmic horizon except one: the merger product between our own Milky Way galaxy and its nearest neighbor, the Andromeda galaxy.