• Question: do you think the big crunch will actualy happen

    Asked by Anonymous to Eimear, James, Jonathan, Lána, Willi on 26 Feb 2018.
    • Photo: William O'Connor

      William O'Connor answered on 26 Feb 2018:

      Another good question!
      You obviously know what the big crunch is, but maybe others don’t.
      The idea is that if the universe started with the big bang, then how will it end?
      Up to recently, it was not clear if the expansion of the universe was slowing down, about constant, or speeding up.
      If it is slowing down, then you’d expect it to stop and then start collapsing, into a “big crunch”, like the opposite of the big bang.
      But it now looks like the expansion of the universe is speeding up!
      If so, a big crunch looks very unlikely.
      But we’ll have to wait a very, very, very long time to find out!

    • Photo: Lána Salmon

      Lána Salmon answered on 27 Feb 2018:

      As Willi said, we’ll have to wait and see in the future! There are load of theories for how the universe will end.

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