Tantalizing evidence hints that dark energy might be evolving, leading some cosmologists to suggest that our universe will collapse in a “Big Crunch” sooner than expected.
Over the past year, massive surveys of galaxies by both the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) have revealed that dark energy — the mysterious force that’s accelerating the expansion of the universe — might be changing with time. If this observation holds, it would be a paradigm-shifting result because it would mean our simplest model of dark energy, called the cosmological constant, is wrong.
With this new result, there is plenty of room for theoretical exploration into possible explanations and radical new theories of the cosmos. One of those, presented in a paper in June but not yet peer-reviewed, proposes a complex model for dark energy that allows for surprising behavior.
Most of my life the prevailing scientific theory has been that we live in an ‘open’ universe that would expand forever.
If we live in a closed universe, it means nothing could escape, even light. Essentially it means we’re already living inside a black hole, which we call the universe.
Essentially it means we’re already living inside a black hole, which we call the universe.
