Overview
- An international team at Spain's Donostia International Physics Centre posted a preprint that puts the universe's total age at 33.3 billion years, leaving about 19.5 billion years to go.
- The estimate uses an axion dark energy model fit to galaxy maps from the Dark Energy Survey Instrument, which hint the push behind cosmic growth may change over time.
- The paper argues the effective cosmological constant could be negative in this setup, which would let gravity stop the growth and start a collapse.
- Outside experts urged caution, with Ed Macaulay calling it interesting but uncertain and Willem Elbers saying both the timing and even a crunch are still up in the air.
- More DESI data and NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope are set to test the idea, and researchers say there is no near-term risk to daily life.