Humans are still untouched by the mysteries of the universe. However, new research is telling that the universe, which was expanding rapidly for millions of years, will soon stop. It will slowly start to shrink.
After nearly 1380 million years of continuous expansion , the universe is now heading towards stagnation . A new research has shown that the universe may now be slowly starting to shrink. This research has been published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. In this research, three scientists have attempted to model the nature of dark energy based on previous observations of the expansion of the universe.
Dark energy is a mysterious force that is said to have caused the universe to expand rapidly. The dark energy in the model is not a constant force of nature , but a unit called Quintessence , which can dissipate over time . Researchers found that even though the universe has been expanding for millions of years, the repellent force of dark energy may be weakening.
According to the researchers’ model, within the next 65 million years, the speed of the universe may end rapidly. Then , in 100 million years , the universe may stop expanding completely . Instead it may begin to shrink at a slow rate , which will end millions of years from now . Then perhaps time and space may be born again.
Paul Steinhardt, director of the Princeton Center of Theoretical Science at Princeton University in New Jersey and the author of this research, says that all this can happen very fast. He said that 65 million years ago, when the Chicxulub Asteroid collided with the Earth. He wiped out the dinosaurs. On the cosmic scale, the time period of 65 million years is very short.
By the 1990s , scientists had known that the universe was expanding rapidly . Compared to millions of years ago , the distance between galaxies is increasing rapidly . Scientists named this rapidly growing mysterious source as dark energy. It is an invisible entity that acts opposite to gravity and pushes the most massive objects in the universe away instead of pulling them together. Although dark energy makes up about 70 % of the total mass – energy of the universe , its properties remain a mystery . Paul Steinhardt says that the question we are raising in this paper is whether this acceleration is going to last forever and if not, what are the alternatives and how quickly can this change happen?
Steinhardt believes that there is no correct way to test whether the quintessence is true or whether the expansion of the cosmic is beginning to slow down . For now , it is just a matter of fitting the theory with previous observations and the researchers have done it very well in their paper . Only time will tell whether the universe will grow endlessly or it will end rapidly.
