The world started with a ‘bang’ but will end in a scary ‘big crunch’ — and scientists think they know when that will be

Yahoo is using AI to generate takeaways from this article. This means the info may not always match what's in the article. Reporting mistakes helps us improve the experience.Generate Key Takeaways

Our humble blue planet came into being with the Big Bang — the sudden expansion of the universe outwards.

Now, according to astrophysicists and cosmologists, Earth and all of its celestial siblings will likely be swallowed back into the super-small singularity they came from, in what is known as the “big crunch” theory.

Alarming as it sounds, physicists say there’s no reason to fret just yet.

In recent years, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has repeatedly predicted that humanity’s doomsday is inching closer and closer, echoing the sentiment that humanity likely won’t be around to see the big crunch. Hero Design – stock.adobe.com

According to leading experts on the matter, the big crunch theory supposes that the universe will eventually stop expanding and everything will be pulled back together.

Cosmologists at Cornell University predict that the big crunch is billions of years away —19.5 to be exact.

Henry Tye, a lead researcher at the institution, suggested that the big crunch will begin in 11 billion years, and will take another 8.5 billion years to conclude.

“Civilizations like us typically exist on time scales of hundreds to thousands of years while the changes happen on billion–year time scales, so we wouldn’t notice any obvious day–to–day phenomenon until the very last moment,” added Luu. IgorZh – stock.adobe.com

Supposing humanity is still around billions of years from now, scientists say it’s unlikely we would notice any distinct changes while the big crunch takes place.

“Intelligent civilizations at the scales of solar systems or even galactic scales would not notice any obvious phenomenon because these changes happen at much larger cosmological scales,” Dr Hoang Nhan Luu, a researcher at the Donostia International Physics Center, explained to the Daily Mail.

However, one of the warning signs would be a rising cosmic temperature.

In a few billion years, it’s probable that the universe, including all of its major celestial bodies, will be the same temperature as the surface of the sun.

‘Needless to say, all humans will burn up in the furnace of this cosmic hell,” Avi Loeb, an astrophysicist at Harvard University, told the Daily Mail.

Scientists suspect our universe’s lifespan is around 33.3 billion years. sdecoret – stock.adobe.com

The theory has been swirling among academic circles for decades, but fell out of favor among some camps of researchers several decades back.

However, after dark energy — a repellent force that pushes things in the universe apart — was discovered in the ’90s and research has progressed, it seems more and more experts are reevaluating their stances.

Mustapha Ishak-Boushaki, an astrophysicist at the University of Texas at Dallas, told Discover Magazine that dark matter research has revealed that the universe isn’t slowing down, but rather, its expansion is accelerating less, and eventually, it will come to a slow halt.

“To survive, human beings have to move to the edge of our solar system or beyond. We have a few billion years’ time to prepare for that trip,” Tye explained to the Daily Mail.

Dark energy is essentially the opposite of gravity, which pushes things together. Claudio Caridi – stock.adobe.com

The big crunch theory spells trouble for humanity in several ways, but it’s far from the first scary-sounding phenomenon that our planet has undergone.

Earth’s magnetic poles reversed 780,000 years ago. Researchers at the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences in Germany created a soundscape of the geological gymnastics routine, which they dubbed a “disharmonic cacophony.”