ENJOY next year, because we may only have another 22 billion of them before the universe rips itself apart.
Galaxies, planets and even atomic nuclei could be destroyed in a monumental “big rip”, as the universe expands so quickly it hastens its own end, physicists at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena calculated in March. Previously, we thought the universe would either just collapse down into a big crunch or expand forever to a state of infinite dilution.
And what is to blame for this ignominious end? A mysterious dark energy, dubbed phantom energy, that is pulling the universe…
