The 'God Particle' discovered by scientists in 2012 has the power to destroy the universe, Professor Stephen Hawking has warned.
The physicist said that at very high energy levels the Higgs boson could become unstable, causing a "catastrophic vacuum decay" that would cause space and time to collapse.
The possibility of this happening is extremely unlikely, he stresses, as scientists do not yet have a particle accelerator large enough to create such conditions.
He makes the comments in a new book Starmus: 50 Years of Man in Space, a collection of essays by scientists and astronomers.
"The Higgs potential has the worrisome feature that it might become megastable at energies above 100bn giga-electron-volts (GeV)," Professor Hawking writes.
"This could mean that the universe could undergo catastrophic vacuum decay, with a bubble of the true vacuum expanding at the speed of light.
"This could happen at any time and we wouldn't see it coming."
