In 1998, the US-born scientists Saul Perlmutter, Brian Schmidt and Adam Riess presented findings that overturned the conventional idea that the expansion was slowing 13.7 billion years after the big bang.They discovered that the universe is expanding at an accelerating pace. Now the Nobel Prize in Physics 2011 was awarded to them for this discovery.
What did they do?
They have measured the universe's expansion by analyzing light from dozens of exploding stars called supernovas. They found the light was weaker than expected, signaling that the expansion of the universe was indeed accelerating.
This discovery implies dramatic cosmological consequences. One of them is that in a trillion years, galaxies will be spread apart from each other by more than the current size of the universe and the ever-greater expansion rate means the light from one galaxy will no longer be visible from another as it is today.
This rapid expansion implies that the universe will get increasingly colder as matter spreads across ever-vaster distances in space, which means the universe will end in ice not in fire.
To explain this strange behaviour of the universe a mysterious repulsive force called dark energy is invoked. But scientists don't know enough about dark energy to predict what will happen to the universe hundreds of billions of years from now.
One possibility is that the expansion will continue to accelerate. It could even speed up so much that not only will galaxies fly apart from each other, but all stuff will really rip apart. This scenario physicists are calling the "big rip".
On the other hand, it is also possible, that the expansion could halt and go into reverse, so the universe collapses back into itself, a fate sometimes called the "big crunch."
Seeing these diverse possibilities many physicists agree that it is very important to learn more about what the dark energy is - a task that is seen as a challenge for generations of scientists to come.
THESIS: If the ONE is really existing, then the scenario of the Big Rip can definitely be excluded. A Cosmic Doomsday does not take place, because the ONE represents an indestructible stuff.