A new study has revealed that the universe will stop expanding soon and its collapse will take place sooner than expected. The physicists claimed that galaxies could rip themselves to shreds in tens of billions of years, which is a relatively short time in cosmological terms.

Physicists Nemanja Kaloper at the University of California, Davis (UCD) and Antonio Padilla at the University of Nottingham said that the clues for collapse of universe can be found in dark energy, which will also help to explain the why the rate of expansion in the universe has accelerated.

Dark energy is considered as a mysterious force that shows how the universe expands. However, no one really knows what exactly what it is. It acts in opposition to gravity and occupies the entire universe.

Padilla said, "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".

According to him, proposed mechanism behind the collapse would help to solve the unanswered questions in physics, including the cosmological constant problem.

The cosmological constant, the value of energy density of the vacuum of space was introduced by Albert Enstein introduced in 1917. It was introduced as an explanation as to why the universe wasn't collapsing.

However, cosmology underwent a paradigm shift in 1998 when researchers discovered the accelerating universe. As, a result, the cosmological constant was given a non-zero value and it was believed that the expansion was the sign of an imminent collapse.

However, the predicted vacuum energy density of the universe creating the expansion is much larger than what is observed. The researchers claim that the current non-zero value is too large.

Scientists, in the latest research mentioned that before the collapse, there will be a period of 'slow roll' that brings about the accelerated expansion seen today. Ultimately, the universe will stop expanding and reach a point at which it will begin to shrink.