ENJOY next year, because we may only have another 22 billion of them before the universe rips itself apart.
Galaxies, planets and even atomic nuclei could be destroyed in a monumental “big rip”, as the universe expands so quickly it hastens its own end, physicists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena calculated in March. Previously, we thought the universe would either just collapse down into a big crunch or expand forever to a state of infinite dilution.
And what is to blame for this ignominious end? A mysterious dark energy, dubbed phantom energy, that is pulling the universe apart at the seams. It is possible this phantom energy will grow until its repulsive force becomes so strong that it rips apart all bound systems, starting with galaxy clusters and rapidly moving down the scale to galaxies, stars, planets and atoms.
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Light will finally fail to keep up with the expansion. So even if any future space traveller found a way to avoid the big rip, they would soon see the visible universe shrinking ever faster around them, until it reached a single point. Don’t have nightmares.