Tag: creation

What Happened Before the Big Bang?

On By A.P.In UncategorizedLeave a comment

By Stephanie Pappas

The Big Bang is commonly thought of as the start of it all: About 13.8 billion years ago, the observable universe went boom and expanded into being.

But what were things like before the Big Bang?

Short answer: We don’t know. Long answer: It could have been a lot of things, each mind-bending in its own way.

The first thing to understand is what the Big Bang actually was.

“The Big Bang is a moment in time, not a point in space,” said Sean Carroll, a theoretical physicist at the California Institute of Technology and author of “The Big Picture: On the Origins of Life, Meaning and the Universe Itself” (Dutton, 2016).

So, scrap the image of a tiny speck of dense matter suddenly exploding outward into a void. For one thing, the universe at the Big Bang may not have been particularly small, Carroll said. Sure, everything in the observable universe today — a sphere with a diameter of about 93 billion light-years containing at least 2 trillion galaxies — was crammed into a space less than a centimeter across. But there could be plenty outside of the observable universe that Earthlings can’t see because it’s physically impossible for the light to have traveled that far in 13.8 billion years.
Thus, it’s possible that the universe at the Big Bang was teeny-tiny or infinitely large, Carroll said, because there’s no way to look back in time at the stuff we can’t even see today. All we really know is that it was very, very dense and that it very quickly got less dense.

As a corollary, there really isn’t anything outside the universe, because the universe is, by definition, everything. So, at the Big Bang, everything was denser and hotter than it is now, but there was no more an “outside” of it than there is today. As tempting as it is to take a godlike view and imagine you could stand in a void and look at the scrunched-up baby universe right before the Big Bang, that would be impossible, Carroll said. The universe didn’t expand into space; space itself expanded.

“No matter where you are in the universe, if you trace yourself back 14 billion years, you come to this point where it was extremely hot, dense and rapidly expanding,” he said.

No one knows exactly what was happening in the universe until 1 second after the Big Bang, when the universe cooled off enough for protons and neutrons to collide and stick together. Many scientists do think that the universe went through a process of exponential expansion called inflation during that first second. This would have smoothed out the fabric of space-time and could explain why matter is so evenly distributed in the universe today.

Before the bang

It’s possible that before the Big Bang, the universe was an infinite stretch of an ultrahot, dense material, persisting in a steady state until, for some reason, the Big Bang occured. This extra-dense universe may have been governed by quantum mechanics, the physics of the extremely small scale, Carroll said. The Big Bang, then, would have represented the moment that classical physics took over as the major driver of the universe’s evolution.

For Stephen Hawking, this moment was all that mattered: Before the Big Bang, he said, events are unmeasurable, and thus undefined. Hawking called this the no-boundary proposal: Time and space, he said, are finite, but they don’t have any boundaries or starting or ending points, the same way that the planet Earth is finite but has no edge.

“Since events before the Big Bang have no observational consequences, one may as well cut them out of the theory and say that time began at the Big Bang,” he said in an interview on the National Geographic show “StarTalk” in 2018.

Or perhaps there was something else before the Big Bang that’s worth pondering. One idea is that the Big Bang isn’t the beginning of time, but rather that it was a moment of symmetry. In this idea, prior to the Big Bang, there was another universe, identical to this one but with entropy increasing toward the past instead of toward the future.

Increasing entropy, or increasing disorder in a system, is essentially the arrow of time, Carroll said, so in this mirror universe, time would run opposite to time in the modern universe and our universe would be in the past. Proponents of this theory also suggest that other properties of the universe would be flip-flopped in this mirror universe. For example, physicist David Sloan wrote in the University of Oxford Science Blog, asymmetries in molecules and ions (called chiralities) would be in opposite orientations to what they are in our universe.

A related theory holds that the Big Bang wasn’t the beginning of everything, but rather a moment in time when the universe switched from a period of contraction to a period of expansion. This “Big Bounce” notion suggests that there could be infinite Big Bangs as the universe expands, contracts and expands again. The problem with these ideas, Carroll said, is that there’s no explanation for why or how an expanding universe would contract and return to a low-entropy state.

Carroll and his colleague Jennifer Chen have their own pre-Big Bang vision. In 2004, the physicists suggested that perhaps the universe as we know it is the offspring of a parent universe from which a bit of space-time has ripped off.

It’s like a radioactive nucleus decaying, Carroll said: When a nucleus decays, it spits out an alpha or beta particle. The parent universe could do the same thing, except instead of particles, it spits out baby universes, perhaps infinitely. “It’s just a quantum fluctuation that lets it happen,” Carroll said. These baby universes are “literally parallel universes,” Carroll said, and don’t interact with or influence one another.

If that all sounds rather trippy, it is — because scientists don’t yet have a way to peer back to even the instant of the Big Bang, much less what came before it. There’s room to explore, though, Carroll said. The detection of gravitational waves from powerful galactic collisions in 2015 opens the possibility that these waves could be used to solve fundamental mysteries about the universes’ expansion in that first crucial second.

Theoretical physicists also have work to do, Carroll said, like making more-precise predictions about how quantum forces like quantum gravity might work.

“We don’t even know what we’re looking for,” Carroll said, “until we have a theory.”

https://www.livescience.com/65254-what-happened-before-big-big.html

Did Scientists Actually Spot Evidence Of Another Universe?

On By A.P.In UncategorizedLeave a comment

universe
The detailed, all-sky picture of the infant universe created from nine years of WMAP data. The image reveals 13.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations (shown as color differences) that correspond to the seeds that grew to become the galaxies. The signal from our galaxy was subtracted using the multi-frequency data. This image shows a temperature range of ± 200 microKelvin.CREDIT: NASA/WMAP SCIENCE TEAM

by Jesse Shanahan

In a study published earlier this month, a team of theoretical physicists is claiming to have discovered the remnants of previous universes hidden within the leftover radiation from the Big Bang. Our universe is a vast collection of observable matter, like gas, dust, stars, etc., in addition to the ever-elusive dark matter and dark energy. In some sense, this universe is all we know, and even then, we can only directly study about 5% of it, leaving 95% a mystery that scientists are actively working to solve. However, this group of physicists is arguing that our universe isn’t alone; it’s just one in a long line of universes that are born, grow, and die. Among these scientists is mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, who worked closely with Stephen Hawking and currently is the Emeritus Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at Oxford University. Penrose and his collaborators follow a cosmological theory called conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) in which universes, much like human beings, come into existence, expand, and then perish.

As a universe ages, it expands, and the constituent parts grow farther and farther apart from each other. Consequently, the interactions between galaxies that drive star formation and evolution become rarer. Eventually, the stars die out, and the remaining gas and dust is captured by black holes. In one of his most famous theories, Stephen Hawking proposed that this isn’t the end; black holes might have a way to slowly lose mass and energy by radiating certain particles. So, after many eons, the remaining black holes in the universe would disappear, leaving only disparate particles. Seemingly a wasteland, this end-state eventually mirrors the environment of our universe’s birth, and so, the cycle starts anew.

universe 2
Artist’s logarithmic scale conception of the observable universe with the Solar System at the center, inner and outer planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri, Perseus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, nearby galaxies, Cosmic Web, Cosmic microwave radiation and Big Bang’s invisible plasma on the edge.CREDIT: WIKIPEDIA/PABLO CARLOS BUDASSI

When our universe was very young, before any recognizable components like stars, planets, or galaxies formed, it was filled with a dense, hot soup of plasma. As the universe expanded, it cooled, and eventually, particles could combine to form atoms. Eventually, the interaction and fusion of these atoms resulted in all of the matter that we observe today. However, we can still observe the leftover radiation from that initial, dense period in our universe’s history. This leftover glow, called the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB), is the oldest electromagnetic radiation, and it fills the entirety of our universe. If the CCC theory were true, then there would be hints of previous universes in our universe’s CMB.

At the end of a universe, when those final black holes dissolve, CCC theory states they should leave behind a signature that would survive the death of that universe and persist into the next. Although not definitive proof of previous universes, detecting that signature would be strong evidence in support of CCC theory. In searching for these “Hawking points”, cosmologists face a difficult obstacle as the CMB is faint and varies randomly. However, Penrose is claiming that a comparison between a model CMB with Hawking points and actual data from our CMB has proven that Hawking points actually exist. If true, this would be the first-ever detection of evidence from another universe.

Unfortunately, as groundbreaking as this discovery seems, the scientific community has largely dismissed it. One of the fundamental characteristics of the CMB is that, although it has patterns, the variations are entirely statistically random. In fact, Penrose’s former collaborator, Stephen Hawking, spotted his own initials in the CMB while others have found a deer, a parrot, and numerous other recognizable shapes in the noise. Similarly, the Wilkinson Anisotropy Microscope Probe that mapped the CMB released an interactive image where you can search for familiar shapes and patterns. An avoidable result of both these random fluctuations and the sheer size of the CMB is that if scientists look hard enough, they can find whatever pattern they need, like the existence of Hawking points, perhaps. Another criticism of Penrose’s claim is that if CCC theory holds true, our universe should have tens of thousands of Hawking points in the CMB. Regrettably, Penrose could find only about 20.

Still, the possibility of alternate universes, whether long-dead or existing in parallel to our own, is tantalizing. Many other theories also claim to find traces of other universes hiding in the patterns of the CMB as well. Although it sounds like science fiction, we are left to wonder: is this just the cosmological equivalent of seeing shapes in random clouds or will scientists one day discover that we are one among many infinite universes?

Jesse Shanahan is an astrophysicist, EMT, and science communicator. For more space and language news, follow her on Twitter here.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jesseshanahan/2018/08/24/did-scientists-actually-spot-evidence-of-another-universe/#2278663f1425

Our Galaxy Has Already Died Once. Now We Are in Its Second Life.

On By A.P.In UncategorizedLeave a comment

milky-way-died-once-reborn-noguchi_1024

The Milky Way is a zombie. No, not really, it doesn’t go around eating other galaxies’ brains. But it did “die” once, before flaring back to life. That’s what a Japanese scientist has ascertained after peering into the chemical compositions of our galaxy’s stars.

In a large section of the Milky Way, the stars can be divided into two distinct populations based on their chemical compositions. The first group is more abundant in what is known as α elements – oxygen, magnesium, silicon, sulphur, calcium and titanium. The second is less abundant in α elements, and markedly more abundant in iron.

The existence of these two distinct populations implies that something different is happening during the formation stages. But the precise mechanism behind it was unclear.

Astronomer Masafumi Noguchi of Tohoku University believes his modelling shows the answer. The two different populations represent two different periods of star formation, with a quiescent, or “dormant” period in between, with no star formation.

Based on the theory of cold flow galactic accretion proposed back in 2006, Noguchi has modelled the evolution of the Milky Way over a 10 billion-year period.

Originally, the cold flow model was suggested for much larger galaxies, proposing that massive galaxies form stars in two stages. Because of the chemical composition dichotomy of its stars, Noguchi believes this also applies to the Milky Way.

That’s because the chemical composition of stars is dependent on the gases from which they are formed. And, in the early Universe, certain elements – such as the heavier metals – hadn’t yet arrived on the scene, since they were created in stars, and only propagated once those stars had gone supernova.

In the first stage, according to Noguchi’s model, the galaxy is accreting cold gas from outside. This gas coalesces to form the first generation of stars.

After about 10 million years, which is a relatively short timescale in cosmic terms, some of these stars died in Type II supernovae. This propagated the α elements throughout the galaxy, which were incorporated into new stars.

But, according to the model, it all went a bit belly-up after about 3 billion years.

“When shock waves appeared and heated the gas to high temperatures 7 billion years ago, the gas stopped flowing into the galaxy and stars ceased to form,” a release from Tohoku University says.

During a hiatus of about 2 billion years, a second round of supernovae took place – the much longer scale Type Ia supernova, which typically occur after a stellar lifespan of about 1 billion years.

It’s in these supernovae that iron is forged, and spewed out into the interstellar medium. When the gas cooled enough to start forming stars again – about 5 billion years ago – those stars had a much higher percentage of iron than the earlier generation. That second generation includes our Sun, which is about 4.6 billion years old.

Noguchi’s model is consistent with recent research on our closest galactic neighbour, Andromeda, which is thought to be in the same size class as the Milky Way. In 2017, a team of researchers published a paper that found Andromeda’s star formation also occurred in two stages, with a relatively quiescent period in between.

If the model holds up, it may mean that the evolution models of galaxies need to be revised – that, while smaller dwarf galaxies experience continuous star formation, perhaps a “dead” period is the norm for massive ones.

If future observations confirm, who’s up for renaming our galaxy Frankenstein?

Noguchi’s paper has been published in the journal Nature.

https://www.sciencealert.com/milky-way-star-formation-two-generations-cold-flow-accretion-model-noguchi