Astronomers may have unwittingly hastened the end of the Universe by simply looking at it.

The novel idea is being aired by two US physicists, who attack the notion that the universe, believed to have been created in the "Big Bang'' some 13.7 billion years ago, will go on, well, forever.

For one thing, cosmologists have discovered that the Universe is still expanding.

And, they believe, a strange, yet-to-be-detected form of energy called dark energy pervades the universe, which would explain why the sum of all the visible sources of energy fall way short of what should be out there.

If so, the universe is not in a nice, stable zero-vacuum state but simply another "false vacuum'' state that may abruptly decay again - and with cataclysmic consequences.

The good news is: the longer the universe survives, the better the chance that it will mature into a stable state. We are just beyond the crucial switching point.

The bad news is: the quantum effect, a truly weird aspect of physics that says whenever we observe or measure something, we reset its clock.
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Thanks for that, but now my brain hurts.

well, the farther away the dark energy we veiwed the longer its effects well be felt, sooo, how far away is it? please so 113 billion light years or no less that 1 million.

Quite an interesting finding; however, I believe further research needs to be done. There isn't much proof of the existance of dark matter in general to even make that claim but I guess there needs to be a hypothesis before you can develop a theory.