American cosmologists suggested that the universe would soon begin to contract.

Adhering to the notion that elusive and mysterious dark energy is its essence, three American astrophysicists – a dynamic scalar field that moves through every corner of space – have suggested that the Universe may soon begin to collapse and sooner or later perish. Kosmin Andrei, Anna Ijas and Paul Steinhardt, who work at Princeton and New York Universities, believe that in 100 million years a new phase may begin. They published an article about it in the journal. PNAS. Reviews of his publications were given by well-known astrophysicists Vyacheslav Mukhanov and Saul Perlmutter.

In the past few decades, researchers have uncovered evidence of the accelerating expansion of the universe: distant objects are moving away from each other at an increasing rate over time. This is because it is considered an as-yet-experimentally-explored entity – dark energy. Until the discovery of the fact of the accelerating expansion of the universe, two models competed, one claiming that expansion would continue forever, but slowing down over time, and the other that expansion would give way to contraction over time. . The newly discovered dark energy is interpreted in several different ways, in particular it could be accumulations of exotic matter with negative pressure or the manifestation of yet unknown gravitational properties. Supporters of the very popular core theory define dark energy as the presence in space of a specific dynamic field that is responsible for the expansion or contraction of the universe.

In the new paper, the three researchers wondered how long it would take for the universe to slow down, start shrinking, and eventually collapse into a single point, if dark energy was truly perfect. They created a model of the universe that uses observational data to describe the properties of the known cosmos. As a result, it turned out that, according to his theory of essence, the accelerated expansion of the Universe can slow down, and it may take about 65 million years for it to completely stop, and the visible compression phase can begin after 100 million. years. However, it is not yet possible to verify all these results, because even if the expansion stage is replaced by compression, information about it can only be obtained after millions of years due to the finite speed of light.