Scientists have long thought our universe would last trillions of years, but new research shows that the universe has a much shorter lifespan. Our universe may only last 33 billion years.
It’s just a cosmic blink of an eye before it all comes crashing down. This is a process called the “Big Crunch,” in which expansion is reversed and all matter and space-time collapse into a very dense state similar to the conditions of the Big Bang. Possibilities about the fate of the universe were long thought to be abandoned as the universe’s expansion accelerates, but this new research has reopened a surprising and slightly disturbing option.
The journey to this dramatic conclusion began with our quest to map the universe, where we focused on dark energy, a mysterious force that is pulling the universe apart at an accelerating rate. Recent data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopy Instrument (DESI) have mapped hundreds of millions of galaxies to investigate this expansion. These important tools suggest with great confidence that dark energy’s “equation of state” – the relationship between pressure and energy density that determines its influence on expansion – is not just a static number. Rather, its influence appears to be changing over time.
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This strange dynamic opens the door to an alternative explanation of what dark energy is made of. This led to the axion dark energy (aDE) model. This model proposes that dark energy is composed of both an axion field, an ultralight form of dark matter flying around the universe, and a cosmological constant, or fixed background expansion, baked into the fabric of spacetime.
In a new paper uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the researchers applied this hybrid model to DES measurements. They found that this combination likely explains the DES and DESI results, but with a twist. In the distant future of the universe, the interaction between the axion field and the cosmological constant will actually actively pull the universe back, leading to the ultimate Big Crunch.
By taking the model that best matched observations and running simulations over time, the researchers calculated the exact moment the universe would end, 33.3 billion years from now. This dramatically short future is in sharp contrast to the traditionally thought-of 1 trillion-year lifespan. Instead of a cosmic expansion where the universe stretches out like a lonely, eternal highway, we make a cosmic U-turn and return to the beginning of our journey.
This is new territory, and while the evidence persuades us, science always comes with caveats. The DES and DESI observations, which suggest that the cosmological constant is not static, are interesting but still require verification. This model depends on many variables, and although several different combinations of them could potentially explain the observations, a negative cosmological constant and the resulting big crunch remain the most likely in our analysis.
More data are needed to rigorously test this model. The universe is a complex creature. Our understanding continues to evolve. In our pursuit of increasing data streams, we piece together the best stories ever told. But that story may end sooner than we expected.
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