Scientists have a pretty good idea of how our universe began: According to the Big Bang theory, an infinitely small, dense point rapidly expanded 13.8 billion years ago, and the universe has been experiencing accelerating expansion ever since. However, trying to imagine where our universe might go next, or even how and when it might eventually end, is still fiercely debated.
"In physics, we can only trust our ideas and theories when we gather the data that test them and confirm them," Nemanja Kaloper, a professor of physics at the University of California, Davis, told Live Science in an email. "[But] in cosmology that is notoriously difficult since the experiments are passive — we cannot recreate the universe to see how things go and improve the data sets at will."
