and a bang. A lot of bangs. Calculations done by an astrophysicist indicate that in the far future, the Universe will have sextillions of objects called black dwarfs, and that eventually they can explode like supernovae. In fact, they may represent the very last things the Universe can do. *. So long from now I'm having difficulty figuring out how to explain how long it'll be. I'll get to it — your brain will be stomped flat by it, I promise — but we need to talk a bit first about stars, and nuclear fusion, and matter. Stars like the Sun release energy as they fuse hydrogen atoms into helium atoms in their cores. It's very much like the way a hydrogen bomb works, but on a massively larger scale; the Sun outputs about the equivalent energy of one hundred billion one-megaton bombs. Every