Coming: The Big Crunch

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Recent cosmological research suggests that the universe may be closer to collapse than previously thought. Don't worry, that's "closer" in cosmological terms, which is still tens of billions of years from now.

According to a newly proposed mechanism of "cosmological collapse," the currently expanding universe will soon stop and retract back in on itself, destroying all matter. The paper, published in Physical Review Letters, posits the new mechanism, not so much to determine the date of The End (which is incidentally, the title of the paper), but to try to imagine a mechanism that takes certain phenomena like dark energy — still poorly understood — into account.

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