Beliebiger Eintrag,
Phantom Energy and Cosmic Doomsday
(Februar 2003)
Zusammenfassung
Cosmologists have long wondered whether the Universe will eventually
re-collapse and end with a Big Crunch, or expand forever, becoming increasingly
cold and empty. Recent evidence for a flat Universe, possibly with a
cosmological constant or some other sort of negative-pressure dark energy, has
suggested that our fate is the latter. However, the data may actually be
pointing toward an astonishingly different cosmic end game. Here, we explore
the consequences that follow if the dark energy is phantom energy, in which the
sum of the pressure and energy density is negative. The positive phantom-energy
density becomes infinite in finite time, overcoming all other forms of matter,
such that the gravitational repulsion rapidly brings our brief epoch of cosmic
structure to a close. The phantom energy rips apart the Milky Way, solar
system, Earth, and ultimately the molecules, atoms, nuclei, and nucleons of
which we are composed, before the death of the Universe in a ``Big Rip''.
