WHAT IS PHANTOM ENERGY?
The end, it would seem, is nigh. Well, relatively speaking, of course. Barring a terrible human-made disaster or a cosmic catastrophe that may perhaps involve an asteroid, Earth's final moments could see it torn apart in – wait for it – 22 billion years' time. But if that is going to keep you awake at night then consider this: the entire universe will also meet a terrible end around the same period, so by current calculations we're approaching the midway stage of its life.
But what would cause this to happen? Scientists suggest that the universe will cease to be because of a mysterious form of dark energy that just so happens to share a name with the title of a Star Wars film. And while it may sound crazy, there are sound scientific principles behind what cosmologists are calling phantom energy – a theory based on the knowledge that the universe has been expanding for 13.8 billion years and that cosmic expansion is actually speeding up.
Astrophysicists discovered that the universe's expansion was accelerating back in 1998 when they noticed that distant Type Ia supernovae were fainter than expected given how far they were from Earth. Two teams had been looking for evidence that the universe was slowing due to gravity, as
