Something is tearing everything apart even faster than we thought – and not even atoms will survive, never mind our picture of how the universe evolved
By Gilead Amit
A CENTURY ago, the universe was a calm and stable place – at least in the minds of cosmologists. Even as the guns rumbled on the Western Front and the world convulsed in total war, Albert Einstein was putting the finishing touches to his vision of a perfectly balanced cosmos. In a paper he presented to the Prussian Academy of Sciences in February 1917, he added a new ingredient to his freshly baked equations of general relativity – one designed to guarantee that the universe could ride out eternity unchanged.
Today Europe is at peace, but there is uproar in the universe. We have long since abandoned Einstein’s idea of a static, unchanging cosmos in favour of a universe that is not only constantly expanding, but whose expansion is continually accelerating, at the mercies of the mysterious agent called dark energy. No one knows what this dark energy might be, beyond the fact that it must make up two-thirds of everything there is.
Except that even this intruder might not be enough. New measurements of how fast the universe is speeding apart suggest that the one thing we thought we knew about dark energy is wrong. A new phantom could be stalking the universe, and the prospect is giving cosmologists chills. It would not only cause the universe to speed away from itself faster and faster until it rips apart, but also imply that none of us should even be here in the first place. “You take it literally, and it has weird ramifications,” says Adam Riess of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland.
When …
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