The collapse of the Universe can happen faster than expected

Physicists have come to new calculations, when the universe will stop expanding and collapse into itself — and this, as you know, is extremely bad news for the matter inside, and saying that this will happen in the next few dozen billion years or so.

By the standards of people that happens, to put it mildly, not soon. But on a cosmological time scale, scientists call it "inevitable," and the collapse will not take long. "The fact that we see dark matter at the present time, is able to explicitly specify in the doom Universe, and we are trying to designate an end date, studying the data," said Phys.org one of the study's authors, Antonio Padilla from the University of Nottingham in the UK.

Offering a new "mechanism of cosmological collapse," the team tries to answer one of the most difficult questions in physics — why the expansion rate of the Universe is currently increasing?

In 1917, when even scientists had no idea that the universe can expand, Einstein came to his "cosmological constant", which defines the energy density of the cosmic vacuum and balance the attraction of matter. After a little more than a decade, the astronomer Edwin Hubble realized that the universe was actually expanding, Einstein abandoned the idea of the cosmological constant. Recently, however, physicists are increasingly coming to the conclusion that dark energy could take its role.

Dark energy is a form of energy, which, according to physicists, is about 68% of the Universe. The dark mother is about 27%, and "normal matter" accounts for less than 5%. The problem is that such a high percentage of dark matter could provide only a tiny increase in the Universe, not the huge one we all know and love, because it was expanding too quickly to give the galaxy a chance to form.

"In accordance with the new mechanism, the universe originated with a set of specific initial conditions that naturally evolved to its current state and will continue to move along this path to total collapse. In such a scenario, will prevail as soon as the engine of collapse, the universe will enter a period of "slow motion", which will lead to the accelerated expansion observed today. In the end, the universe will stop expanding and will begin to move in the opposite direction, begin to shrink, leading to a Large Compression (opposite of Big Bang)".

The work of scientists was published in Physical Review Letters. However, even if scientists are right, we will have tens of billions of years preparing for this Grand event.published

Source: hi-news.ru