Dark-energy clues push the universe toward a future Big Crunch
New measurements from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and DESI suggest the cosmological constant may be negative, causing the universe to keep expanding for about 11 billion more years before contracting to a Big Crunch roughly 20 billion years from now, for an approximate total lifespan of 33 billion years. The scenario relies on evolving dark energy, potentially linked to a very light particle, and is consistent with observations from DES and DESI, with future surveys like Euclid, SPHEREx, and Rubin Observatory planned to test the idea.