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Seems legitimate... Nigerian astronaut lost in space needs $3m to get home

It's better than the alternative.

Current thinking has the sun doing this in around 5 billion years, so it's now half way through its life cycle - converting over 4 million tons of mass into energy every second. However, in red giant form it will expand to engulf Mercury and Venus, but maybe not Earth - though the planet will be burnt to a charred rocky crisp anyway. Mars and the outer planets would escape as the sun will also lose mass as it expands, meaning their orbits would move further out. Once the red giant phase is over, the gases in the sun would dissipate, ultimately forming a planetary nebula, reaching right out to the Oort Cloud on the furthest edge of the present Solar system. After 10,000 - 20,000 years this too will dissipate and become fodder for future clustering and new star / planet generation. How big will the Sun become when it dies? - Big Think If the universe continues expanding, and accelerating, at its current rate then there will come a time (estimated at around 100 trillion years) where the dispersed matter from all the stars in all the galaxies won't be able to cluster together - it will have expanded too far apart. In around 10^100 years the last remaining objects, supermassive black holes, will have evaporated away due to Hawking radiation, and eventually even atoms will be ripped apart. The universe will then consist of a thin soup of sub atomic particles which will, in accordance with the second law of thermodynamics, spread out, producing the "Big Freeze" theory of how the universe ends. (Or Big Fraser theory, to those who get it: We're doomed! Doomed!) The Beginning to the End of the Universe: The Big Crunch vs. The Big Freeze | Astronomy.com Taking things further, and more controversially, theoretical physicist Roger Penrose has come up with the theory of Conformal Cyclic Cosmology (CCC). Basically, once the universe is an unchanging soup of particles, time ceases to have any meaning - the exact conditions prior to the Big Bang, and a new universe begins all over again. This theory hasn't really become mainstream though.

A recent paper postulates that the dark energy of the universe comes from massive black holes like this. The larger the black hole, the bigger its vacuum energy - the energy of open space, where particles continually pop in and out of existence. As a black hole grows, its vacuum energy increases, so, by the law of conservation of energy, it must give off negative energy to compensate. There are detractors of this theory, but the paper shows that the abundance of these black holes would produce a combined negative energy that neatly fits with the amount of dark energy thought to exist. If the theory is true then, although black holes locally suck, they universally blow, causing the expansion of the universe. Dark energy from supermassive black holes? Physicists spar over radical idea | Science | AAAS