Researchers have long-believed the universe will collapse one day and condense into a small, hard ball; new research strengthens this theory and suggests it may happen sooner than we thought.
One day, a dramatic "shift in forces" will cause every particle in the universe to gain weight; everything, even grains of sand on the beach, will become billions of times heavier than it was before, a University of Southern Denmark news release reported.
"Many theories and calculations predict such a phase transition- but there have been some uncertainties in the previous calculations. Now we have performed more precise calculations, and we see two things: Yes, the universe will probably collapse , and: A collapse is even more likely than the old calculations predicted," Jens Frederik Colding Krog, PhD student at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP ³ - Origins) at University of Southern Denmark, said in the news release.
If and when this happens the unfathomable weight would cause the universe to compress into a "super hot and super heavy ball."
The process is called a "phase transition," and can be compared to what happens when water becomes steam.
A phase transitional will occur when a bubble forms as a result of Higgs-field (associated with the Higgs-particle) hits a different value than the rest of the universe. Under the conditions that the bubble is a significant size and the Higgs-field's value creates a lower energy, the bubble would expand at the speed of light. The items within the bubble would have a much higher mass than they did before getting consumed.
"The phase transition will start somewhere in the universe and spread from there. Maybe the collapse has already started somewhere in the universe and right now it is eating its way into the rest of the universe. Maybe a collapsed is starting right now right here here. Or maybe it will start far away from here in a billion years. We do not know," Krog said.
The team looked at three primary equations that help calculate the phase transitional. By using all three of these equations together the researchers were able to predict the collapse is approaching faster than they thought.
"The latest research shows that the universe's expansion is accelerating, so there is no reason to expect a collapse from cosmological observations. Thus it will probably not be Big Crunch that causes the universe to collapse," Krog said.
There is, of course, a change the universe won't collapse at all.
"It is a prerequisite for the phase change that the universe consists of the elementary particles that we know today, including the Higgs particle. If the universe contains undiscovered particles, the whole basis for the prediction of phase change disappears," the news release reported.
