The end of the universe is about to get interesting. Most data favours a slow fade into a silent, frozen oblivion. But a new analysis suggests the cosmos could gradually tear itself apart, galaxy from galaxy and atom from atom. Or at least, we can’t rule it out.
We know that the universe mostly consists of dark matter, which only interacts with regular matter via gravity, and dark energy, a mysterious, unseen force thought to be accelerating the expansion of the universe.
Now, it seems the distribution of dark energy favours a gradual rip as the eventual fate of our universe, says Mariam Bouhmadi-López at the Technical University of Lisbon in Portugal.
Depending on how dark energy behaves, there are a number of possible end-time scenarios. In the most popular, it causes expansion to accelerate steadily over time, until galaxies, stars and atoms grow too distant and cold to interact – a Big Freeze.
But if dark energy behaves differently so that the acceleration rate is not constant and increases with time, it will eventually tear everything to bits in a kind of rip.
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