Planetary securityCollapse of the universe closer than previously thought

Scientsts attest to the inevitability of the universe's collapse, or not // Source: wikipedia.org

Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball.

New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction — and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.

Sooner or later a radical shift in the forces of the universe will cause every little particle in it to become extremely heavy. Everything — every grain of sand on Earth, every planet in the solar system and every galaxy — will become millions of billions times heavier than it is now, and this will have disastrous consequences: The new weight will squeeze all material into a small, super hot and super heavy ball, and the universe as we know it will cease to exist.

A University of Southern Denmark release reports that this violent process is called a phase transition and is very similar to what happens when, for example, water turns to steam or a magnet heats up and loses its magnetization. The phase transition in the universe will happen if a bubble is created where the Higgs-field associated with the Higgs-particle reaches a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value results in lower energy and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass, that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will be pulled together and form supermassive centers.

“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”, says Jens Frederik Colding Krog, Ph.D. student at the Center for Cosmology and Particle Physics Phenomenology (CP ³ - Origins) at University of Southern Denmark and co-author of an article on the subject in the Journal of High Energy Physics.