Scientists Calculate That the Entire Big Bang Must Have Taken Place Inside a Black Hole
The standard model of cosmology may be the best explanation we've got for why the universe is the way it is and how it all came to be. But it's not the only explanation.
Enter black hole cosmology. It's a radical idea which proposes that the Big Bang — the rapid unraveling of an infinitely dense point, believed to have given birth to the cosmos as we know it — actually took place in a black hole, which itself formed inside a larger "parent" universe.
Ergo, all of us — and every star, planet, galaxy, and internet rando — are living inside one of these mysterious singularities.
Enrique Gaztanaga, lead author of a new study published in the journal Physical Review D and a professor at the Institute of Cosmology and Gravitation at the University of Portsmouth, isn't the first to propose this controversial idea. But his team's research offers a new model for imagining how this hypothetical scenario took place.
"Our calculations suggest the Big Bang was not the start of everything, but rather the outcome of a gravitational crunch or collapse that formed a very massive black hole — followed by a bounce inside it," Gaztanaga wrote in an essay for The Conversation.
Certainly, there are a lot of holes you could poke in the standard model. Why is there more matter than anti-matter, when the universe should be uniform? Why did the universe undergo a period of "cosmic inflation" in which it expanded at faster than light speeds, then stopped? And why does its present day rate of expansion appear to be different depending on how we measure it?
Gaztanaga's main gripe seems to be with our current understanding of a singularity. To him, the idea of the universe starting as a point of infinite density is immensely unsatisfying.
"This is not just a technical glitch; it's a deep theoretical problem that suggests we don't really understand the beginning at all," he wrote.
Gaztanaga also takes aim at other convenient cosmological constructions like dark energy, which is intended to explain why the universe's expansion is mysteriously accelerating. This hypothetical force is thought to make up 68 percent of the universe but is completely unobservable, leaving room for different-minded scientists to call its existence into question.
Rethinking singularities could neatly resolve many of these conundrums. We return to Gaztanaga's paper.
"Gravitational collapse does not have to end in a singularity," he wrote for The Conversation. "Our maths show that as we approach the potential singularity, the size of the universe changes as a (hyperbolic) function of cosmic time."
This is a bold claim. The consensus is that gravitational collapse — like a star imploding into a black hole — must result in an infinitely dense singularity. What Gaztanaga is arguing happens instead is that the collapse not only halt short of completely crushing the matter, but reverses course — a "bounce," in his terminology.
"What emerges on the other side of the bounce is a universe remarkably like our own," Gaztanaga explains. "Even more surprisingly, the rebound naturally produces the two separate phases of accelerated expansion — inflation and dark energy — driven not by a hypothetical fields but by the physics of the bounce itself."
It's a fascinating explanation, but there's a lot that remains to be proved. It relies on discounting some very well-established physics behind singularities. The standard model may not be perfect, but it's the standard for a reason. It'll take a lot more to dethrone it, and Gaztanaga is optimistic that future missions like the European Space Agency's ARRAKIHS, which will study invisible structures of dark matter to test the model, could reveal the answers we're looking for.
More on cosmology: Astronomers Confused to Discover That a Bunch of Nearby Galaxies Are Pointing Directly at Us
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