New futures for cosmological models

Abstract

The discovery of accelerated expansion of the Universe opened up the possibility of new scenarios for the doom of our space–time, besides eternal expansion and a final contraction. In this paper, we review the chances that may await our universe. In particular, there are new possible singular fates (sudden singularities, big rip, etc.), but there also other evolutions that cannot be considered as singular. In addition to this, some of the singular fates are not strong enough in the sense that the space–time can be extended beyond the singularity. For deriving our results, we make use of generalized power and asymptotic expansions of the scale factor of the Universe. This article is part of the theme issue ‘The future of mathematical cosmology, Volume 1’.