New research suggests that the universe may end trillions of years sooner than we thought, with the potential for a process dubbed the "Big Crunch" where all matter and space-time collapses in a single place. The findings follow a study by astronomers using data from the Dark Energy Survey (DES) and Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) to investigate the universe's expansion rate. These data suggests that dark energy's influence on expansion appears to be changing over time, leading to the axion dark energy (aDE) model, which combines an axion field and a fixed background expansion baked into the structure of space time. The researchers applied this hybrid model to DES measurements and calculated a precise moment of cosmic demise: 33.3 billion years from now.