Is THIS how the world will end? The universe has a 'self-destruct button' that could WIPE OUT life in an instant, scientists warn

From the Big Crunch to the heat death of the universe, it seems that science is always finding new ways the cosmos might come to an end.

But physicists have now revealed the most devastating doomsday scenario possible.

Experts believe the universe may have a built-in 'self-destruct button' called false vacuum decay.

If this was ever triggered, every planet, star, and galaxy would be wiped out and life as we know it would become impossible.

The basic idea is that our universe isn't currently in its most stable state, meaning we are in what scientists call a 'false vacuum'.

If any part of the universe is ever pushed into its stable state, a bubble of 'true vacuum' will expand through the universe, destroying everything it touches.

Professor Ian Moss, a cosmologist at Newcastle University, told MailOnline that the universe is like 'a table-top with many dominoes standing on their side.'

Professor Moss says: 'They can stay upright unless some small disturbance topples one, and triggers all of them to fall.'

All objects contain a certain amount of energy and the amount of energy it contains is called its 'energy state'.

The lower the energy state, the more stable the object becomes.

If you think about a lump of coal, it has a very high energy state because it contains lots of potential energy, which means it's unstable and could catch on fire.

Once that coal has been burned and the energy released as heat, the remaining ash has a very low energy state and becomes stable.

Everything in the universe, from lumps of coals to stars, wants to get to its most stable state and so always tends towards the lowest energy state possible.

We call the lowest energy state an object can have its 'vacuum' state, but sometimes objects can get trapped in something called a 'false vacuum'.

Dr Louise Hamaide, a postdoctoral fellow at the National Institute for Nuclear Physics in Naples, told MailOnline: 'A good analogy for a field in a false vacuum is a marble in a bowl on top of a stool.

'The marble cannot leave the bowl unless it is given some energy in the form of a push, and if it does it will fall all the way to the ground.'

Being on the ground is what we would call the vacuum state, whereas the bowl is merely a false vacuum which prevents the marble from falling to the ground.

What makes this idea worrying is the possibility that a fundamental part of the universe's structure could be stuck in one of these false vacuums.

All it needs is a little push, and the structure of reality itself will come crashing down to the ground.

The idea of a false vacuum gets really scary when we apply it to our current model of reality.

The universe and everything in it is made of subatomic particles such as electrons, photons, and quarks.

But according to quantum field theory, all of these particles are actually just disturbances in an underlying field.

Dr Alessandro Zenesini, a scientist at the National Institute of Optics in Italy, told MailOnline: 'The basic idea of quantum field theory is to represent reality only with fields.

'Think of a water surface. When flat, it is an empty field. As soon you have a wave, this wave can be seen as a particle which can interact with another wave.'

Just like everything else, these fields have energy states, and want to get to their lowest energy state possible like a body of water becoming flat and calm.

In the first few seconds of the Big Bang, so much energy was released that it pushed all the fundamental fields down into their vacuum states.

But scientists now think that one of the fields might have gotten stuck along the way.

Some researchers believe that the Higgs field, the field which makes the elusive Higgs Boson, is stuck in a false vacuum state.

This essentially means that the entire universe could be rigged to blow at any moment.

If the Higgs field is ever pushed down to its true vacuum, the resulting 'phase shift' will release a vast amount of energy.

This energy is so concentrated that it will force nearby areas of the field out of their false vacuum, dropping their energy level and releasing even more energy.

The resulting chain reaction would spread through the universe like the flames from a match dropped into a lake of petrol.

A bubble of true vacuum would then spread out in a sphere from the starting point until it consumes the entire cosmos.

At its edge, between the true and false vacuum, the energy would collect into a thin wall of incredible power.

Dr Hamaide says: 'That kinetic energy of the wall is so high, even though the Higgs carrying this energy is a very heavy particle, it would move at the speed of light.

'So we would never see the wall coming, because light couldn't reach us before the wall did.'

If the wall hit the solar system, Dr Hamaide says it would have so much energy that 'it would instantaneously destroy any star or planet its path'.

However, what would be left behind after the initial destruction is perhaps even more terrifying.

The interaction between the fundamental fields is what gives particles their properties and determines how they interact.

This, in turn, determines everything from the physics that holds planets together to the chemical reactions taking place inside our cells.

If the Higgs field suddenly takes on a new energy level, none of the physics we are familiar with would be possible.

Dr Dejan Stojkovic, a cosmologist from the University at Buffalo, told MailOnline: 'As a consequence, electrons, quarks and neutrinos would acquire masses different from their current values.

'Since the structures that we observe around us are made atoms, whose existence depends on the precise values of the parameters in the standard model, it is likely that all these structures would be destroyed, and perhaps new ones would be formed.'

Scientists have no idea what the world left behind by false vacuum decay would be like.

But we do know that it would be absolutely incompatible with life as we now know it.

To trigger false vacuum decay, you would need an extremely powerful force to pack a huge amount of Higgs particles into a tiny space.

In the current universe, places with this much energy might not even be possible but the bad news is that the early universe might have been violent enough to do it.

In particular, scientists think that dense regions of matter might have been crushed into tiny primordial black holes in the first few seconds of the Big Bang.

These are ultra-dense points of matter no larger than a single hydrogen atom but containing the mass of an entire planet.

As these black holes evaporate through Hawking radiation, some researchers believe they could trigger false vacuum decay.

Professor Moss says: 'Condensation is a similar process to vacuum decay, the condensation of water vapour into clouds is triggered by tiny grains of dust or ice crystals.

'Tiny black holes seed vacuum decay in the same way.'

Perhaps one of the strangest implications of false vacuum decay is that it might have already started somewhere in the universe.

Dr Hamaide says: 'Under some very specific assumptions, we showed these bubbles are 100 per cent likely to occur.'

According to some calculations, one primordial black hole in the universe would be enough to trigger the universe's self-destruct process.

Likewise, due to small fluctuations at the quantum level, known as quantum tunnelling, it is possible that the parts of the universe might randomly jump into the lower energy state at any time.

That could mean that a bubble of true vacuum is already out there somewhere in the cosmos, racing towards us at the speed of light and annihilating everything it encounters.

The comforting news is that, even at the speed of light, it could take billions of years for a true vacuum bubble to reach us.

If the bubble starts far enough away, the expansion of the universe might even mean it never reaches us at all.

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Dr Hamaide and Professor Moss suggest that the fact we aren't already dead is evidence that there aren't any primordial black holes out there in the first place.

We also don't know what effects dark matter and dark energy could have on the energy state of the universe.

It might be possible that these mysterious substances reverse any bubble expansions as soon as they occur to keep the universe stable.

However, until a bubble of true vacuum does tear our reality apart, there might not be any way to know who's right.