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Date:December 12, 2013Source:University of Southern DenmarkSummary:Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations now confirm this prediction — and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought.

A collapse of the universe will happen if a bubble forms in the universe where the Higgs particle-associated Higgs-field will reach a different value than the rest of the universe. If this new value means lower energy, and if the bubble is large enough, the bubble will expand at the speed of light in all directions. All elementary particles inside the bubble will reach a mass that is much heavier than if they were outside the bubble, and thus they will pull each other into supermassive centers. Credit: Image courtesy of University of Southern Denmark

Maybe it happens tomorrow. Maybe in a billion years. Physicists have long predicted that the universe may one day collapse, and that everything in it will be compressed to a small hard ball. New calculations from physicists at the University of Southern Denmark now confirm this prediction — and they also conclude that the risk of a collapse is even greater than previously thought…