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- Joined
- 17 Nov 2010
- Posts
- 184
Black hole encounters would have repeated themselves several
times, with the center of each event remaining at almost exactly
the same point in the CMB sky, even when occurring in different
aeons. The huge amounts of energy released would appear as
spherical, low-variance radiation bursts in the CMB. Image credit:
Gurzadyan and Penrose.
In general, asking what happened before the Big
Bang is not really considered a science question. According to Big
Bang theory, time did not even exist before this point roughly
13.7 billion years ago. But now, Oxford University physicist Roger
Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in
Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background
(CMB) that allows them to "see through" the Big Bang into what
came before.
The CMB is the radiation that exists everywhere in the universe,
thought to be left over from when the universe was only 300,000
years old. In the early 1990s, scientists discovered that the CMB
temperature has anisotropies, meaning that the temperature
fluctuates at the level of about 1 part in 100,000. These
fluctuations provide one of the strongest pieces of observational
evidence for the Big Bang theory, since the tiny fluctuations are
thought to have grown into the large-scale structures we see
today. Importantly, these fluctuations are considered to be random
due to the period of inflation that is thought to have occurred in
the fraction of a second after the Big Bang, which made the
radiation nearly uniform.
However, Penrose and Gurzadyan have now discovered concentric
circles within the CMB in which the temperature variation is much
lower than expected, implying that CMB anisotropies are not
completely random. The scientists think that these circles stem
from the results of collisions between supermassive black holes
that released huge, mostly isotropic bursts of energy. The bursts
have much more energy than the normal local variations in
temperature. The strange part is that the scientists calculated
that some of the larger of these nearly isotropic circles must
have occurred before the time of the Big Bang.
The discovery doesn't suggest that there wasn't a Big Bang -
rather, it supports the idea that there could have been many of
them. The scientists explain that the CMB circles support the
possibility that we live in a cyclic universe, in which the end of
one "aeon" or universe triggers another Big Bang that starts
another aeon, and the process repeats indefinitely. The black hole
encounters that caused the circles likely occurred within the
later stages of the aeon right before ours, according to the
scientists.
In the past, Penrose has investigated cyclic cosmology models
because he has noticed another shortcoming of the much more widely
accepted inflationary theory: it cannot explain why there was such
low entropy at the beginning of the universe. The low entropy
state (or high degree of order) was essential for making complex
matter possible. The cyclic cosmology idea is that, when a
universe expands to its full extent, black holes will evaporate
and all the information they contain will somehow vanish, removing
entropy from the universe. At this point, a new aeon with a low
entropy state will begin.
Because of the great significance of these little circles, the
scientists will do further work to confirm their existence and see
which models can best explain them. Already, Penrose and Gurzadyan
used data from two experiments - WMAP and BOOMERanG98 - to detect
the circles and eliminate the possibility of an instrumental cause
for the effects. But even if the circles really do stem from
sources in a pre-Big Bang era, cyclic cosmology may not offer the
best explanation for them. Among its challenges, cyclic cosmology
still needs to explain the vast shift of scale between aeons, as
well as why it requires all particles to lose their mass at some
point in the future.
times, with the center of each event remaining at almost exactly
the same point in the CMB sky, even when occurring in different
aeons. The huge amounts of energy released would appear as
spherical, low-variance radiation bursts in the CMB. Image credit:
Gurzadyan and Penrose.
In general, asking what happened before the Big
Bang is not really considered a science question. According to Big
Bang theory, time did not even exist before this point roughly
13.7 billion years ago. But now, Oxford University physicist Roger
Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan from the Yerevan Physics Institute in
Armenia have found an effect in the cosmic microwave background
(CMB) that allows them to "see through" the Big Bang into what
came before.
The CMB is the radiation that exists everywhere in the universe,
thought to be left over from when the universe was only 300,000
years old. In the early 1990s, scientists discovered that the CMB
temperature has anisotropies, meaning that the temperature
fluctuates at the level of about 1 part in 100,000. These
fluctuations provide one of the strongest pieces of observational
evidence for the Big Bang theory, since the tiny fluctuations are
thought to have grown into the large-scale structures we see
today. Importantly, these fluctuations are considered to be random
due to the period of inflation that is thought to have occurred in
the fraction of a second after the Big Bang, which made the
radiation nearly uniform.
However, Penrose and Gurzadyan have now discovered concentric
circles within the CMB in which the temperature variation is much
lower than expected, implying that CMB anisotropies are not
completely random. The scientists think that these circles stem
from the results of collisions between supermassive black holes
that released huge, mostly isotropic bursts of energy. The bursts
have much more energy than the normal local variations in
temperature. The strange part is that the scientists calculated
that some of the larger of these nearly isotropic circles must
have occurred before the time of the Big Bang.
The discovery doesn't suggest that there wasn't a Big Bang -
rather, it supports the idea that there could have been many of
them. The scientists explain that the CMB circles support the
possibility that we live in a cyclic universe, in which the end of
one "aeon" or universe triggers another Big Bang that starts
another aeon, and the process repeats indefinitely. The black hole
encounters that caused the circles likely occurred within the
later stages of the aeon right before ours, according to the
scientists.
In the past, Penrose has investigated cyclic cosmology models
because he has noticed another shortcoming of the much more widely
accepted inflationary theory: it cannot explain why there was such
low entropy at the beginning of the universe. The low entropy
state (or high degree of order) was essential for making complex
matter possible. The cyclic cosmology idea is that, when a
universe expands to its full extent, black holes will evaporate
and all the information they contain will somehow vanish, removing
entropy from the universe. At this point, a new aeon with a low
entropy state will begin.
Because of the great significance of these little circles, the
scientists will do further work to confirm their existence and see
which models can best explain them. Already, Penrose and Gurzadyan
used data from two experiments - WMAP and BOOMERanG98 - to detect
the circles and eliminate the possibility of an instrumental cause
for the effects. But even if the circles really do stem from
sources in a pre-Big Bang era, cyclic cosmology may not offer the
best explanation for them. Among its challenges, cyclic cosmology
still needs to explain the vast shift of scale between aeons, as
well as why it requires all particles to lose their mass at some
point in the future.
