The discovery of the Universe’s late-time acceleration and dark energy has led to a great deal of research into cosmological singularities, and in this brief review, we discuss all the prominent developments in this field for the best part of the last two decades. We discuss the fundamentals of spacetime singularities, after which we discuss in detail all the different forms of cosmological singularities that have been discovered in recent times. We then address methods and techniques to avoid or moderate these singularities in various theories and discuss how these singularities can also occur in non-conventional cosmologies. We then discuss a useful dynamical systems approach to deal with these singularities and finish up with some outlooks for the field. We hope that this work serves as a good resource to anyone who wants to update themselves with the developments in this very exciting area.

Interest in cosmological singularities has remarkably grown in recent times, particularly on future singularities with the discovery of late-time acceleration of the universe and dark energy. While such explorations have previously been done in various modified gravity and quantum gravitationally inspired cosmologies (besides standard general relativistic cosmology), no such an endeavour has been taken up till now in the realms of renormalization group approaches to cosmology and we have hence took up on this journey. In this work, we consider the formation of cosmological singularities in an asymptotically safe cosmology where the cut off scale is proportional to the Hubble parameter. We consider a well motivated inhomogeneous form of the equation of state(EOS) as well. We firstly delve into some basics of this cosmology and show that such a scenario permits a transition between phantom and quintessence forms of universal evolution. We then show that one can have Type I - Type IV singularities in such a cosmology for various version of the EOS and that the singularities can occur both in finite and infinite time. The conditions in which these singularities occur is significantly different than how they occur in the standard cosmology, with the formulations being even more involved. Interestingly this difference comes about without the need of any free parameters in the cosmological models, which is usually what one observes when one goes for the same pursuit via various modified gravity/ QG inspired cosmological approaches. Furthermore, we showed that usual singularity removal methods like conformal anomaly effects and f(R) gravity effects do not offer much hope for singularity removal in this cosmology.

The quest of deciphering the true nature of dark energy has proven to be one of the most exciting in recent times in cosmology. Various ideas have been put forward in this regard besides the usual cosmological constant approach, ranging from scalar field based models like Quintessence and Phantom dark energy to various modified gravity approaches as well. A very interesting idea then is to consider scalar field dark energy models in quantum gravitationally corrected cosmologies with the RS-II Braneworld being one of the most well known in this regard. So in this work, we consider RS-II Braneworld based scalar field dark energy models and try to look out for the existence of finite time singularities in these regimes both through a dynamical system perspective, for which we employ the Goriely–Hyde singularity analysis method, and a physical perspective. Our approach is general in the sense that it is not limited to any particular class of potentials or for any constrained parameter region for the brane tension and is valid for both Quintessence and phantom dark energy regimes. We firstly show through Goriely–Hyde procedure that finite time singularities can exist in these models for a limited set of initial conditions and that this result would hold irrespective of any consideration given to the swampland dS conjecture. We then discuss the physical nature of the singularities that can occur in this regime, where we use a well motivated ansatz for the Hubble parameter and show that these models of dark energy can allow for weak singularities like those of Type III and Type IV and can also allow for strong singularities like the Big Rip (Type I).

We explore the asymptotic future evolution of holographic dark energy (HDE) models, in which the density of the dark energy is a function of a cutoff scale $L$. We develop a general methodology to determine which models correspond to future big rip, little rip, and pseudo rip (de Sitter) evolution, and we apply this methodology to a variety of well-studied HDE models. None of these HDE models display little rip evolution, and we are able to show, under very general assumptions, that HDE models with a Granda-Oliveros cutoff almost never evolve toward a future little rip. We extend these results to HDE models with nonstandard Friedman equations and show that a similar conclusion applies: little rip evolution is a very special case that is almost never realized in such models.