Article written by Tim collins,
A fundamental particle that gives mass to all matter in the universe could one day lead to its destruction, physicists have revealed. Experts say that our cosmos may ended as abruptly as it began in a collision with a bubble of negative energy, created by a Higgs boson - the so-called 'God particle'.
The slow demise of our ever-expanding universe is predicted in the Standard Model of particle physics, used by scientists to explain the basic building blocks of matter.
Under it, a force called dark energy is driving accelerating expansion of the universe which will continue until everything fades to a cold, featureless abyss.
But a new study suggests the end will come with a bang, rather than a whimper, in around 10x139 years.
Worse still, the processes behind this dramatic finale to all life as we know it may have already started, kick started by interaction with a black hole. Researchers at Harvard University made the startling discovery by studying what we already know about the masses of particles and how they interact.
The mass of the Higgs Boson, theorised since the 1970s and discovered in 2012 at the Large Hadron Collider, is believed to be 125 gigaelectronvolts - a measure of energy used in particle accelerator physics.
However, thanks to a quirk of quantum physics - the laws of the universe which explain the interaction of sub-atomic particles - this mass may not always remain constant.
Experts theorise that the current mass of the Higgs boson may one day be altered.
Should this happen to the quantum particle, which gives all other matter its mass, it could tear apart all of the processes that make life in our universe possible.
This could create an expanding bubble of negative energy in which the laws of physics as we know them are completely obliterated.
This bubble would continue growing until it envelops the entirety of the universe. <!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
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