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The universe is an intriguing place housing billions of stars and galaxies. While scientists are constantly trying to learn more about it, they are also working to understand how it might die someday. 

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A scientist duo, one from the US and the other from India have come up with the idea that the universe might end in a "long freeze", a moment when everything will slow down. There won't be any new sources of energy left and this would lead the existing stars to slowly die down.

It is based on the “holographic dark energy" theory which states that the gravitational force is merely a hologram of a lower-dimensional reality. This means that the universe is a two-dimensional space where quantum forces create the illusion of gravity and 3D space. 

In the non-peer-reviewed paper published on the preprint server arXiv, the scientists tried to understand the ultimate fate of the universe if holographic dark energy actually rules it.

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Dark energy is believed to be responsible for the expansion of the universe, although no one has ever observed it. It comprises roughly 70 per cent of the energy density of the entire cosmos. When the universe expands, the density of both regular and dark matter drops, while more and more dark energy manifests. 

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Universe will stop expanding and die slowly

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The researchers found that the universe will continue to expand because of the holographic dark energy but eventually, its influence will slowly start to wane off and all acceleration will slow down. The rate of the universe's expansion will slowly decrease and at a point, the cosmos will reach a nearly static value. This will be the universe's final size.

When this happens, the density of holographic dark energy will also diminish, along with the density of matter, after which the universe will come to its last stop. This scenario has been dubbed as The Long Freeze.

Once the long freeze sets in, the universe is no longer expanding and so there are no new sources of energy for all the matter inside.

Due to a lack of energy, the stars will dwindle away and the subatomic particles will drift away into the cold.

Previous theories about the end of the universe have stated two scenarios - the "Big Freeze" and the "Big Crunch". In the former, heat and energy will evenly spread across the universe and its final temperature will be just above absolute zero. 

Meanwhile, Big Crunch posits that the universe will age in reverse and go back to the Big Bang when it all started.