Dai Zihai, a physicist at Cornell University in the United States, recently proposed that the universe is currently at about half of its 33 billion-year lifespan, and will stop expanding in about 11 billion years. Eventually, a "cosmic Big Crunch" will occur, and all matter will shrink to a single point.
Based on the latest dark energy observation data, Dai Zihai updated the cosmological model and adopted the "cosmological constant" theory, a method proposed by Einstein more than a century ago to describe the expansion of the universe. Dai Zihai said: "In the past 20 years, everyone believed that the cosmological constant was positive and the universe would expand infinitely. However, new data shows that the cosmological constant is negative and the universe will eventually shrink and collapse."
The research has been published in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics. Dai Zihai predicted through models that the "Big Crunch" will occur in about 20 billion years, when space and time will end.
This year, new reports released by the Dark Energy Survey (DES) in Chile and the Dark Energy Spectroradiometer (DESI) in Arizona, USA, show that dark energy, which dominates 68% of the mass and energy of the universe, is not entirely derived from cosmological constants and still contains unknown components. The team proposed that there may have been hypothetical particles of extremely low mass in the early universe, which once acted as cosmological constants but now no longer play a dominant role. The model agrees well with the observational data and pushes the cosmological constant into the negative range.
Dai Zihai pointed out: "The idea that a negative cosmological constant leads to the eventual collapse of the universe is not new, but we can quantitatively predict when and how it will collapse through models."
Major scientific research teams around the world are measuring the distances and dark energy conditions between millions of galaxies through a variety of dark energy observation projects to obtain more accurate data. DESI will continue to observe for another year, and other facilities such as the Zwicky Survey, the EU Euclid Space Telescope, the SPHEREx project and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory are also advancing related research.
Dai Zihai believes that quantitative analysis of the lifespan of the universe will help humans deeply understand the evolution of the universe. "Any life wants to know its end, and the same is true for the universe. In the 1960s, we knew that the universe had a beginning, and now the latest data gives us a glimpse of its end."
Compiled from /ScitechDaily