+- Scivillage.com Casual Discussion Science Forum (https://www.scivillage.com)
+-- Forum: Science (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-61.html)
+--- Forum: Astrophysics, Cosmology & Astronomy (https://www.scivillage.com/forum-74.html)
+--- Thread: Research The universe may end trillions of years sooner than we thought (/thread-20323.html)
The universe may end trillions of years sooner than we thought - C C - Apr 29, 2026
https://www.livescience.com/space/cosmology/the-universe-may-end-trillions-of-years-sooner-than-we-thought
INTRO: Scientists have long assumed our universe would continue on for trillions of years, but a new study presents a much shorter life span for the cosmos: Our universe might last only another 33 billion years.
That's just a cosmic blink before everything collapses in on itself ?—? a process dubbed the "Big Crunch," where expansion reverses, causing all matter and space-time to collapse back into an extremely dense state similar to the conditions of the Big Bang. While long considered a discarded possibility for the fate of the universe, because of accelerating cosmic expansion, this new research has reopened the surprising — and slightly unsettling — option.
The journey to this dramatic conclusion started with our quest to map the cosmos, where we've focused on dark energy, the mysterious force that's pushing the universe apart at an accelerating rate. Recent data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) mapped hundreds of millions of galaxies to probe this expansion. These crucial tools suggest, with extremely high confidence that the dark energy "equation of state" — its pressure-to-energy density relationship, which dictates its effect on expansion — isn't simply a static number. Instead, its influence appears to be changing over time.
This strange dynamic opens the door for alternative explanations for what dark energy might be made of. This has led to the axion dark energy (aDE) model, which proposes that dark energy comprises both an axion field, which would be an ultra-light form of dark matter that sloshes around the universe, plus a cosmological constant, or fixed background expansion baked into the structure of space-time.
In the new paper, which was uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, the researchers applied this hybrid model to DES measurements... (MORE - details)