Collapse of the universe coming sooner than expected according to new research

You've heard of the Big Bang, but what about the "Colossal Crash?" Get ready, because it might be coming sooner than you think ... relatively speaking.

In a paper published in Physical Review Letters a group of physicists have theorized a mechanism for "cosmological collapse" which predicts the universe will at some point stop expanding and then collapse back onto itself, destroying us and pretty much all matter.

The idea has been floating around the scientific community in one form or another for a while now, but the latest paper is noteworthy because its numbers and models suggest that collapse is "imminent" -- at least on a cosmological scale.

"The fact that we are seeing dark energy now could be taken as an indication of impending doom, and we are trying to look at the data to put some figures on the end date," Antonio Padilla at the University of Nottingham, one of the paper's authors, told Phys.org. "Early indications suggest the collapse will kick in in a few tens of billions of years, but we have yet to properly verify this."

Our universe is currently in a period of accelerated expansion so we have nothing to worry about for the moment, but in the paper's conclusion, the team of scientists claim they've found the cause our impending doom ... but they need to do a bit more research.

For now, let's enjoy some of these stunning pictures of our universe captured by the Hubble Space Telescope:

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