How many endings for the universe can they think of?
You probably know the big bang, the standard theory in cosmology nowadays of the first existence of time and space…where the universe started out as a singularity of extremely high energy and “exploded” and “expanded” and “cooled to the day we are today…
And you might heard of the the big crunch, where we will contract back to a little point due to the gravity pull of matter in the universe being greater than the expansion.
And well, of course, theres the case of the expansion being larger than the force of gravity and we would just keep on expanding until we are far enough to meet our doom of entropy death or it could just stretch like a huge 4-D rubber band and we could go for The Big Rip….
But the one ending you will never heard of is of “The Big Trip”.
Extract
In a scenario dubbed the “big trip”, so-called phantom energy trickling into a wormhole will cause it to swell up so much that it eventually engulfs the entire universe, says cosmologist Pedro Gonzalez-Diaz at the Institute of Mathematics and Fundamental Physics in Madrid, Spain.
Phantom energy is a form of the dark energy that could be responsible for the puzzling accelerated expansion of the universe. Its defining property is that its energy density increases with time. “Phantom energy is precisely the form of energy one needs to create a wormhole,” says Diaz. “Wormholes, therefore, would actually be expected components of the space-time foam if dark energy is actually phantom energy. It is natural to study both at the same time.”
Wormholes are theoretical structures connecting two regions of space, or even two parallel universes. In Diaz’s scenario, phantom energy enters the wormhole through one end, making it grow. Eventually, the wormhole will grow so large and so quickly that the whole universe will be swallowed by it.
“The paper deals with a remarkable combination,” says Christian Armendariz-Picon at Syracuse University, New York. “However, wormholes have two entries. What happens at the second one?”
From issue 2525 of New Scientist magazine, 12 November 2005, page 23
And the links to the articles are
http://arxiv.org/abs/hep-th/0406261
And all the phantom stuff by Pedro Gonzalez-Diaz
http://arxiv.org/find/astro-ph/1/au:+Gonzalez_Diaz_P/0/1/0/all/0/1
Of course, these are not crackpot theories and one could find all the details in the papers. Time and again, I get to read these lovely theories of unimaginable creativity which never fails to surprise me (or for this case, humor me). Lets see what they come up with next , maybe The Big Party…
