The Big Rip

When I was a kid and, in fact most of the way through grad school, the Standard Model held the universe was going to end in a cyclic "Big Crunch", the reset button would be pushed, and a new universe would be created. It smacked of such elegance that everyone assumed it would be true once the evidence came in. Some in the spiritual community even held that it was evidence of an intelligent designer, or of a vindication of the wisdom of past thinkers.

It seems we were all way, way wrong on this one.

Cosmologists have long wondered whether the Universe will eventually re-collapse and end with a Big Crunch, or expand forever, becoming increasingly cold and empty. Recent evidence for a flat Universe, possibly with a cosmological constant or some other sort of negative-pressure dark energy, has suggested that our fate is the latter. However, the data may actually be pointing toward an astonishingly different cosmic end game. Here, we explore the consequences that follow if the dark energy is phantom energy, in which the sum of the pressure and energy density is negative. The positive phantom-energy density becomes infinite in finite time, overcoming all other forms of matter, such that the gravitational repulsion rapidly brings our brief epoch of cosmic structure to a close. The phantom energy rips apart the Milky Way, solar system, Earth, and ultimately the molecules, atoms, nuclei, and nucleons of which we are composed, before the death of the Universe in a ``Big Rip''.

In other words, the universe is an exploding bomb and we are trapped inside.

Full paper here, a good read on a Sunday afternoon.