Physicists have known that dark energy could become negative and the universe could collapse sometime in the distant future, perhaps a trillion years. But now we see that we might be not in the beginning, but in the middle of the life cycle of our universe. |
The standard vision at the moment is that the universe is speeding up, so we were surprised to find that a collapse could happen with such a short amount of time. |
The universe may be doomed to collapse and disappear. Everything we see now, and at a much larger distance that we cannot see, will collapse into a point smaller than a proton. |