Doomed! We're All Doomed! (In Tens of Billions of Years)

The end is near. Well, near-ish:

Scientists claim an ‘imminent’ collapse of the universe will take place sooner than expected. According to a new study, galaxies could rip themselves to shreds in tens of billions of years – a relatively short time in cosmological terms.  If the scientists are right about their theory, it may help explain the presence of dark energy and why the rate of expansion in the universe has accelerated.

Nemanja Kaloper at the University of California, Davis, and Antonio Padilla at the University of Nottingham say clues for a collapse can be found in dark energy. Dark energy is a mysterious force that can be observed in models that show how the universe expands – but no one known exactly what it is.

‘The fact that we are seeing dark energy now could be taken as an indication of impending doom, and we are trying to look at the data to put some figures on the end date,’ Padilla told Lisa Zyga at Phys.org. ‘Early indications suggest the collapse will kick in in a few tens of billions of years, but we have yet to properly verify this.’

Darn! That little “verification” thingummy strikes again. But look on the bright side: a few more visits to the pub are all in the interests of science.