Is our universe trapped inside a black hole? This James Webb Space Telescope discovery might blow your mind
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Without a doubt, since its launch, the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has revolutionized our view of the early universe, but its new findings could put astronomers in a spin. In fact, it could tell us something profound about the birth of the universe by possibly hinting that everything we see around us is sealed within a black hole.
The $10 billion telescope, which began observing the cosmos in the Summer of 2022, has found that the vast majority of deep space and, thus the early galaxies it has so far observed, are rotating in the same direction. While around two-thirds of galaxies spin clockwise, the other third rotates counter-clockwise.
In a random universe, scientists would expect to find 50% of galaxies rotating one way, while the other 50% rotate the other way. This new research suggests there is a preferred direction for galactic rotation.
The observations of 263 galaxies that revealed this strangely coordinated cosmic dance was collected as part of the James Webb Space Telescope Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey, or "JADES."
"It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations," team leader Lior Shamir, associate professor of computer science at the Carl R. Ice College of Engineering, said in a statement. "One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole. "But if the universe was indeed born rotating, it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete."
Black hole cosmology, also known as "Schwarzschild cosmology," suggests that our observable universe might be the interior of a black hole itself within a larger parent universe.
The idea was first introduced by theoretical physicist Raj Kumar Pathria and by mathematician I. J. Good. It presents the idea that the "Schwarzchild radius," better known as the "event horizon," (the boundary from within which nothing can escape a black hole, not even light) is also the horizon of the visible universe.
This has another implication; each and every black hole in our universe could be the doorway to another "baby universe." These universes would be unobservable to us because they are also behind an event horizon, a one-way light-trapping point of no return from which light cannot escape, meaning information can never travel from the interior of a black hole to an external observer.
This is a theory that has been championed by Polish theoretical physicist Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven.
Black holes are born when the core of a massive star collapses. At its heart is matter with a density that far exceeds anything in the known universe.
In Poplawski's theory, eventually, the coupling between torsion, the twisting and turning of matter, and spin becomes very strong and prevents the matter from compressing indefinitely to a singularity. "The matter instead reaches a state of finite, extremely large density, stops collapsing, undergoes a bounce like a compressed spring, and starts rapidly expanding," Poplawski explained to Space.com. "Extremely strong gravitational forces near this state cause an intense particle production, increasing the mass inside a black hole by many orders of magnitude and strengthening gravitational repulsion that powers the bounce."
The scientist continued by adding that rapid recoil after such a big bounce could be what has led to our expanding universe, an event we now refer to as the Big Bang. "It produces a finite period of cosmic inflation, which explains why the universe that we observe today appears at largest scales flat, homogeneous, and isotropic," Poplawski said.
"Torsion in the gravity of an extended theory of Einstein's general relativity therefore provides a plausible theoretical explanation of a scenario, according to which every black hole produces a new, baby universe inside and becomes an Einstein-Rosen bridge, or a 'wormhole' that connects this universe to the parent universe in which the black hole exists."
In the new universe, according to this theory, the parent universe appears as the other side of the new universe's only white hole, a region of space that cannot be entered from the outside and which can be thought of as the reverse of a black hole. "Accordingly, our own universe could be the interior of a black hole existing in another universe," Poplawski continued. "The motion of matter through the black hole's boundary, called an event horizon, can only happen in one direction, providing a past-future asymmetry at the horizon and, thus, everywhere in the baby universe. "The arrow of time in such a universe would, therefore, be inherited, through torsion, from the parent universe."
As for these new JWST findings. Poplawski told Space.com: "It would be fascinating if our universe had a preferred axis. Such an axis could be naturally explained by the theory that our universe was born on the other side of the event horizon of a black hole existing in some parent universe."He added that black holes form from stars or at the centers of galaxies, and most likely globular clusters, which all rotate. That means black holes also rotate, and the axis of rotation of a black hole would influence a universe created by the black hole, manifesting itself as a preferred axis.
"I think that the simplest explanation of the rotating universe is the universe was born in a rotating black hole. Spacetime torsion provides the most natural mechanism that avoids a singularity in a black hole and instead creates a new, closed universe," Poplawski continued. "A preferred axis in our universe, inherited by the axis of rotation of its parent black hole, might have influenced the rotation dynamics of galaxies, creating the observed clockwise-counterclockwise asymmetry. "The discovery by the JWST that galaxies rotate in a preferred direction would support the theory of black holes creating new universes, and I would be extremely excited if these findings are confirmed.
Related Stories:
— Weird physics at the edges of black holes may help resolve lingering 'Hubble trouble'
—James Webb Space Telescope finds our Milky Way galaxy's supermassive black hole blowing bubbles (image, video)
— Tiny black holes left over from the Big Bang may be prime dark matter suspects
Another explanation for why the JWST may have seen an overrepresentation of galaxies rotating in one direction is that the Milky Way's own rotation could have caused it.
Previously, scientists had considered the speed of our galaxy's rotation to be too slow to have a non-negligible impact on observations made by the JWST.
'If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe," Shamir concluded. "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself."
The team's research was published this month in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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