Universe will end in a “big crunch” roughly 20 billion years from now.
The universe is nearing the halfway point of what may be a 33-billion-year lifespan, according to new calculations by a Cornell physicist using updated dark energy data.
The findings suggest that the cosmos will continue expanding for roughly another 11 billion years before reversing course, contracting back into a single point in a dramatic “big crunch.”
Henry Tye, the Horace White Professor of Physics Emeritus in the College of Arts and Sciences, arrived at this conclusion after updating a theoretical model that incorporates the “cosmological constant,” a concept first proposed by Albert Einstein more than a century ago and widely used by modern cosmologists to describe the universe’s expansion.
“For the last 20 years, people believed that the cosmological constant is positive, and the universe will expand forever,” Tye said. “The new data seem to indicate that the cosmological constant is negative, and that the universe will end in a big crunch.”
Tye is the corresponding author of a recent study about the findings published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.
The universe, now about 13.8 billion years old, continues to expand outward. According to Tye, the future depends on the value of the cosmological constant: if it is positive, expansion will continue indefinitely; if it is negative, the universe will eventually reach a maximum size before reversing direction and collapsing entirely.
