Dark Stars: The Explosion That Changes the Universe express
The universe exists in a state of false vacuum, like water behind a dam. Behind it lies the true vacuum — an abyss with different laws. Normally, water can only seep through the pores in a thin trickle (a quantum effect), barely changing the level.
But if a dense clump appears in the lake, boson stars made of dark matter, its weight presses through the bottom. The star collapses, pressure builds, and the dam shatters. In an instant, a bubble of true vacuum bursts out and rushes in all directions at the speed of light, triggering a cosmological phase transition — the rebirth of space itself. This process requires no quantum rarities: it’s pure classical physics.
Such a catastrophe can occur anywhere in the cosmos, and its expanding bubble will alter the expansion of the Universe and fundamental constants. If it heads our way, we won’t notice its approach, and at the moment of collision, ordinary matter vanishes, and with it, all laws. Fortunately, the probability of such an event in the observable Universe is vanishingly small.
Original abstract
as written by the authors arXiv:2511.21826
We present a new classical mechanism for nucleation of bubbles of true vacuum. The mechanism arises when dense boson stars form in the false vacuum. As the boson stars collapse due to attractive self-interactions, the field inside the star cores is enhanced beyond the potential barrier. Subsequently the stars explode as true vacuum bubbles, and induce a cosmological phase transition. The mechanism raises the possibility that a vacuum that is stable against quantum tunneling can be vulnerable to ``astrophysical'' processes.
During false vacuum decay, fundamental constants like the electron mass could become different.
The idea of false vacuum decay inspired Stephen Baxter's novel "Vacuum Diagrams".