The fate of the universe has changed, and according to scientists, we won’t be torn to shreds but will be compressed, falling under the pressure of gravity. A team of South Korean scientists notes in a study that the universe will likely end in the Big Crunch. This is because of dark energy that is becoming weaker, and this will hand over power to gravity, which will pull everything together. Previously, scientists believed gravity would eventually slow down the expansion of the universe. But then in 1998, they saw signs of dark energy and said that this force is speeding up the expansion of the universe. This process was assumed to rip apart atoms in the future, causing the Big Rip.
The South Korean scientists gathered supernova data that first revealed dark energy nearly three decades ago. Prof Young Wook Lee, of Yonsei University in Seoul, and his team adjusted this information and noted a change in dark energy, and that the acceleration of the universe was slowing down. This, he says, has changed the fate of the universe. In such a scenario, where dark energy weakens, gravity would take over and pull the galaxies back together. This opens up the possibility of Big Crunch becoming very real. Professor Ofer Lahav of University College London told the BBC that with dark energy going up and down, the entire physics would be shaken up.
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Big Bang in reverse
What will happen is a Big Bang in reverse, with the universe falling in on itself. There would be no forces left to expand the universe any further, and all intergalactic matter would condense together. A core would start burning up, and all the stars and planets would be sucked into it, setting every other celestial body on fire. There would be no space or time, and all that would be left is a huge fireball.
However, Lee’s theory does not have many takers. The larger view still is that the universe is continuously expanding and dark energy remains unchanged. What would the Big Crunch look like to us? Several papers have talked about the Big Crunch, and here is what it would appear like to us on Earth. The visible stars and galaxy clusters will become closer to each other and start merging. Stars will collide with each other, and the cosmic microwave background, as observed by telescopes, would reach thousands of degrees Celsius. Right now, the temperature of this radiation is just under 3 degrees above “absolute zero”.