Cornell Model Sees Expansion Halt in 11 Billion Years, Big Crunch in 20 Billion
Updated
Updated · spacedaily.com · Aug 26
Cornell Model Sees Expansion Halt in 11 Billion Years, Big Crunch in 20 Billion
1 articles · Updated · spacedaily.com · Aug 26
Summary
A Cornell-led team calculated that in one best-fit scenario the universe’s expansion stops about 11 billion years from now, then reverses and ends in a Big Crunch roughly 20 billion years ahead.
The result comes from an axion dark-energy model in which a positive ultralight field now masks a negative cosmological constant; as the field weakens, the negative term eventually dominates and drives recollapse.
The benchmark universe reaches a maximum scale factor of about 1.69 before contraction, with a total lifespan of 33.3 billion years versus the universe’s current age of about 13.8 billion.
The authors stress this is not an observed countdown or an official DESI forecast: other allowed parameters give a 40.3-billion-year lifespan, and a zero cosmological constant still fits current data.
The calculation is motivated by weak, model-dependent hints that dark energy evolves rather than stays constant, a question future DESI, Euclid, Rubin and Roman measurements will test.