Science Alert reports:

If recent discoveries that dark energy is evolving hold any water, our Universe will collapse under its own gravity on a finite timeline, new calculations suggest.

Based on several recent dark energy results, a new model finds that the Universe has a lifespan of just 33.3 billion years. Since we are now 13.8 billion years after the Big Bang, this suggests that we have a smidge less than 20 billion years left.

For another 11 billion years, the Universe will continue to expand, before coming to a halt and reversing direction, collapsing down to the hypothetical Big Crunch, say physicists Hoang Nhan Luu of Donostia International Physics Center in Spain, Yu-Cheng Qiu of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, and corresponding author Henry Tye of Cornell University in the US.

“For the last 20 years, people believed that the cosmological constant is positive, and the universe will expand forever,” Tye says. “The new data seem to indicate that the cosmological constant is negative, and that the Universe will end in a Big Crunch.” [Continue reading…]