May 22, 2007 — It sounds crazy, but as the universe expands faster and faster, it will eventually get to a point where the cosmos seen through a telescope will look a lot smaller than today, say physicists.

That's because in a few hundred billion, or perhaps a few trillion years, all but our local group of galaxies will have moved so far away they will be lost forever.

As a result, any cosmologist of that distant time who tries to figure out the history of the universe will have no clue to the Big Bang or the existence of the vast clusters of galaxies we can see today in every direction with powerful telescopes. Not even the microwave background radiation — the subtle and surest sign of the Big Bang — will remain within reach.