It's called a false vacuum decay, or more colloquially the Big Slurp. It's a law of physics that a system will naturally try to become stable. To do so it moves from a state of high energy to one with lower energy, until it stabilizes into its lowest possible energy state.
Big Slurp. This theory posits that the universe currently exists in a false vacuum and that it could become a true vacuum at any moment. In order to best understand the false vacuum collapse theory, one must first understand the Higgs field which permeates the universe.
The Big Crunch Theory says that, one day, the universe will stop growing. Then, it will begin to shrink. As the universe grows smaller, it will also get hotter. One way to think of this is as the opposite of the Big Bang. Instead of expanding and cooling, the universe will shrink and heat up.
If dark energy remains unchanging, space will expand indefinitely while increasingly isolated stars will slowly fade away and go cold, a phenomenon referred to as Heat Death. And if dark energy keeps accelerating the expansion of the universe, space itself will eventually be torn apart in the Big Rip.
The remaining stars and planets will explode. Finally, the last atoms will be ripped apart. The latest measurements point to a Heat Death, but a Big Crunch or Big Rip are within their uncertainties. The final doomsday scenario that Mack describes is extremely unlikely: vacuum decay.
At the time of the Big Crunch, all the matter in the universe would be crushed into an infinitely hot, infinitely dense singularity similar to the Big Bang. The Big Crunch may be followed by another Big Bang, creating a new universe.
These calculations showed that our universe's destiny is determined by its density, and it could either expand or contract, rather than remain in a steady state. With enough matter, gravity would eventually halt the cosmos' expansion, causing it to come crashing back inward.
"There was actually another universe existing before the present one and the Big Bang merely marked the end of that universe. Evidence of that previous universe can still be observed these days," he said.
As the universe expands, it pulls time with it because space and time are linked as one. But this implies that if the universe were to reach a theoretical limit of expansion and begin to contract, then time would reverse — a slight paradox.
In either case, you could never get to the end of the universe or space. Scientists now consider it unlikely the universe has an end – a region where the galaxies stop or where there would be a barrier of some kind marking the end of space.
Roughly 1 trillion years from now, the last star will be born. In about 100 trillion years, the last light will go out. The bad news is that the universe is going to die a slow, aching, miserable death. The good news is that we won't be around to see it.
Einstein's general theory of relativity predicts that time ends at moments called singularities, such as when matter reaches the center of a black hole or the universe collapses in a “big crunch.” Yet the theory also predicts that singularities are physically impossible.
The first long-lived matter particles of any kind were protons and neutrons, which together make up the atomic nucleus. These came into existence around one ten-thousandth of a second after the Big Bang. Before that point, there was really no material in any familiar sense of the word.
In the beginning, there was an infinitely dense, tiny ball of matter. Then, it all went bang, giving rise to the atoms, molecules, stars and galaxies we see today. Or at least, that's what we've been told by physicists for the past several decades.
Since nothing we know of can travel faster than light, we may never be able to pass that barrier. Some ancient light from beyond the Particle Horizon may still reach us, but there's a boundary from beyond which even ancient light can't be seen called the Cosmic Event Horizon.
Our Milky Way galaxy is destined to collide with our closest large neighbour, the Andromeda galaxy, in about five billion years. Scientists can predict what's going to happen. The merger will totally alter the night sky over Earth but will likely leave the solar system unharmed, according to NASA.
Cosmologists aren't sure if the universe is infinitely big or just extremely large. To measure the universe, astronomers instead look at its curvature. The geometric curve on large scales of the universe tells us about its overall shape. If the universe is perfectly geometrically flat, then it can be infinite.
Eventually, the entire contents of the universe will be crushed together into an impossibly tiny space – a singularity, like a reverse Big Bang. Different scientists give different estimates of when this contraction phase might begin. It could be billions of years away yet.
The trite answer is that both space and time were created at the big bang about 14 billion years ago, so there is nothing beyond the universe. However, much of the universe exists beyond the observable universe, which is maybe about 90 billion light years across.
Time travel to the past is theoretically possible in certain general relativity spacetime geometries that permit traveling faster than the speed of light, such as cosmic strings, traversable wormholes, and Alcubierre drives.
So far, the evidence supporting the idea of a multiverse is purely theoretical, and in some cases, philosophical. Some experts argue that it may be a grand cosmic coincidence that the big bang forged a perfectly balanced universe that is just right for our existence.
The term dark matter was coined in 1933 by Fritz Zwicky of the California Institute of Technology to describe the unseen matter that must dominate one feature of the universe—the Coma Galaxy Cluster.
The Black Hole Era, which is predicted to last from about 1040 to 10100 (10 duodecillion to 1 googol) years after the Big Bang, spans an unimaginably long stretch of time, even for astronomical timescales. Imagine a universe with no bright stars, no planets, and no life whatsoever — that's the Black Hole Era.
The timeline of how life universe ends up in a Big Rip. Disconzi's hypothesis says that a Big Rip can occur when dark energy will become stronger than gravity, reaching a point when it can rip apart single atoms.
In 1922, Russian physicist and mathematician Alexander Friedmann derived a famous set of equations aptly named the Friedmann equations. These calculations showed that our universe's destiny is determined by its density, and it could either expand or contract, rather than remain in a steady state.