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Myths and legends: the big-rip and the fate of the universe

A special feature of big-rip is being produced by a perfect fluid state parameter less than -1, often called phantom power, and leads to an asymptotic evolution of the scale factor so that this becomes infinite in finite time.

is important to note that this process, in contrast to the evolution caused by dark energy with greater than or equal than -1 and less than -1 / 3, not lead to a heat death. Intuitively we might think it this way: if the expansion is even stronger than dark energy or cosmological constant for example, then, bringing these to a heat death, the big-rip with even more reason to take a heat death.

The problem is that this argument based on the dilution of energy density is only valid for the ordinary energy, but not for the phantom energy. On the contrary, the energy density of phantom energy increases with time, leading to what is known as the big-rip singularity (an energy density infinite).

This is easily seen if one considers that the local energy conservation for a perfect fluid we obtain the known equation



To less than -1 is clear that will increase as increases and will be infinite when is infinite. More details on the properties of dark energy in the famous role of Caldwell:

A Phantom Menace? Cosmological Consequences of a dark energy component with super-negative equation of state