This has a little of the feel for someone throwing something against the wall to see it it sticks! But, apparently these physicists actually believe this to be a real possibility "in tens of billions of years". The focus of their work involves the action of "dark energy".
CBS Sacramento
March 24, 2015 12:14 PM
Davis, Calif. (CBS SACRAMENTO) – Physicists predict the universe is primed for a "cosmological collapse" that will cause the universe to stop expanding at its current rate and ultimately collapse in on itself to wipe away all known matter.
Physicists Nemanja Kaloper at the University of California Davis and Antonio Padilla at the University of Nottingham proposed the "imminent" collapse – which on the cosmological scale is a few tens of billions of years from today, Phys.org reports. Their paper published in Physical Review Letters focuses on the "dark energy" causing the constant expansion of the universe that is predicted to ultimately continue on a path toward collapse.
The researchers sought to answer the massive physics quandary of why the universe is expanding at an accelerated rate and to identify what the dark energy is causing the acceleration.
"I think we have opened up a brand new approach to what some have described as 'the mother of all physics problems,' namely the cosmological constant problem," Padilla told Phys.org. "It's way too early to say if it will stand the test of time, but so far it has stood up to scrutiny, and it does seem to address the issue of vacuum energy contributions from the standard model, and how they gravitate."
More: http://sacramento.cbslocal.com/2015/03/24/researchers-predict-imminent-collapse-of-universe-after-period-of-rapid-expansion/