TIME.com

How the Universe Will End

Scientists think they know how the universe began,
but what happens at the other end of the space—time continuum
was a deep, dark mystery—until now

By Michael D. Lemonick
June 17, 2001

For those who live in a city or near one, the night sky isn't much to look at—just a few scattered stars in a smoggy, washed-out, light-polluted expanse. In rural Maine, though, or the desert Southwest or the high mountains of Hawaii, the view is quite different. Even without a telescope, you can see thousands of stars twinkling in shades of blue, red and yellow-white, with the broad Milky Way cutting a ghostly swath from one horizon to the other. No wonder our ancient ancestors peered up into the heavens with awe and reverence; it's easy to imagine gods and mythical heroes inhabiting such a luminous realm.

The W. M. Keck Observatory in Hawaii.

Yet for all the magnificence of the visible stars, astronomers know they are only the first shimmering veil in a cosmos vast beyond imagination. Armed with ever more powerful telescopes, these explorers of time and space have learned that the Milky Way is a huge, whirling pinwheel made of 100 billion or more stars; that tens of billions of other galaxies lie beyond its edges; and, most astonishing of all, that these galaxies are rushing headlong away from one another in the aftermath of an explosive cataclysm known as the Big Bang.

That event—the literal birth of time and space some 15 billion years ago -- has been understood, at least in its broadest outlines, since the 1960s. But in more than a third of a century, the best minds in astronomy have failed to solve the mystery of what happens at the other end of time. Will the galaxies continue to fly apart forever, their glow fading until the cosmos is cold and dark? Or will the expansion slow to a halt, reverse direction and send 10 octillion (10 trillion billion) stars crashing back together in a final, apocalyptic Big Crunch, the mirror image of the universe's explosive birth? Despite decades of observations with the most powerful telescopes at their disposal, astronomers simply haven't been able to decide.
(Full Story)

Don had this over at Algorithms.com and MSNBC Space News, but I thought some here might have missed it.

Enjoy,
Dan