Paris - The bad news is that the universe will end in a runaway expansion so violent that galaxies and planets will be torn apart and individual atoms of human flesh will be ripped asunder in the tiniest fraction of a second.
The good news, though, is that you can go ahead and book your summer holiday - this disaster won't happen for another 22 billion years.
Robert Caldwell, a physicist at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, says the doomsday scenario inverts the widespread belief that the cosmos will end with a whimper.
"Until now we thought the universe would either re-collapse or expand forever to a state of dilution," he told New Scientist magazine. "Now we've come up with a third possibility - the big rip," he explained.
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| 'It can't be proved impossible' |
The universe is commonly believed to have been created with a "big bang" about 14 billion years ago. It has been expanding ever since, driven by a mysterious force known as dark energy.
Most scientists believe that the acceleration will eventually weaken, or at least stay constant.
But according to Caldwell's theory, the dark energy - or "phantom energy" as he calls it - may be growing more powerful, essentially acting as a foot on the expansion accelerator.
The universe will be stretched further and further away, until the light of the stars can't reach us. Eventually, phantom energy will tear apart all bound systems, breaking the electrical bonds that hold matter together.
In the most extreme scenario, the "big rip" would happen 22 billion years from now, with the Milky Way destroyed 60 million years before the universe's absolute end.
"In the last moments, even atomic nuclei will be ripped apart," Caldwell said. His research, co-authored with colleagues at the California Institute of Technology, has been submitted to the specialised journal Physical Review.
Britain's Astronomer Royal, Martin Rees, has studied phantom energy and believes that doomsday is "unlikely".
"But it can't be proved impossible," he warned. - Sapa-AFP
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