Will the universe be torn apart "in a few billion years"?
That's what Ars seems to think.
Our Milky Way galaxy is speeding through the emptiness of space at 600 kilometers per second, headed toward something we cannot clearly see. The focal point of that movement is the Great Attractor, the product of billions of years of cosmic evolution. But we'll never reach our destination because, in a few billion years, the accelerating force of dark energy will tear the Universe apart.
However, the person who literally wrote the book on this (The End of Everything: (Astrophysically Speaking) by Katie Mack) isn't nearly so sure.
https://www.americanscientist.org/article/tearing-apart-the-universe
The last time I calculated the earliest possible Big Rip, based on the 2018 data release from the Planck satellite, I got something in the vicinity of 200 billion years.
We probably shouldn’t panic just yet. As discussed, the data still aren’t that clear. Most measurements of w give a value that is fully consistent with −1, and though it’s true that values less than −1 are sometimes very slightly preferred, that preference isn’t really statistically meaningful. As for the Hubble Constant disagreement, even if all the measurements are correct, nonapocalyptic explanations for the discrepancy—involving weird models of dark matter, or altered conditions in the early universe—are very much in the running. In fact, even tweaking dark energy wouldn’t be enough to totally solve the problem, so it’s not unreasonable to assume that the solution might lie elsewhere. And even if there has been a sharp upturn in the effects of dark energy in recent cosmic history, suggesting something like phantom dark energy, we still have a lot of time before a Big Rip could possibly occur.
Shame on Ars for sloppy science journalism. We can usually expect better from them.
#big-rip #end-of-everything #the-end #the-end-of-everything #science #science-journalism #astronomy #dark-energy #sensationalism #cosmology #universe #astrophysics #dark-matter #dark-energy
