Big Bang is not the beginning of the universe

The universe does not appear silently that through an explosion! At least, that's what we often hear: The universe and everything in the universe came into being at the time of the Big Bang. Space, time, all internal matter and energy start from a single point, then expand and cool from there to form billions of years of time to atoms, why, galaxies and the super galaxy spreads over billions of light years - it is our existing Universe. That magnificent and fascinating picture explains many things about what we see, from the large-scale structure of two trillion galaxies in the Universe to the remnant radiation from the explosion that infects every object. living. Unfortunately, this is a mistake. Scientists have realized this nearly 40 years ago.

The universe gradually expanded and cooled, but in the past it was thicker and hotter.At the beginning, Big Bang was considered a strange "knot" from which the appearance of the thick and hot to the extreme.But today we have a better understanding.(Source: NASA Goddard Space Center).

According to Vesto Slipher's record, the bigger the distance of a galaxy we are, the faster it moves away from us.For years, this was not consistent with Big Bang, until Hubble allowed us to observe and arrange the pieces together: The universe is expanding. VESTO SLIPHER, (1917): PROC.AMER.PHIL.SOC, 56, 403.

The idea of ​​the Big Bang first appeared in the 1920s and 1930s. When observing distant galaxies, the scientists discovered something unusual: the farther away the galaxies were from us, the more galaxies seemed to be. The faster you move away from us. According to the predictions of Einstein's General Theory of Relativity, a static universe will not be gravitationally stable; everything or need to move away from each other or gravitate toward each other if the space grid follows Einstein's law. Observing this decline tells us that the Universe is expanding , and later, things that are farther apart from each other have been very close together in the distant past.

If you look further and further away, you will also look further into the past.The earlier you go back, the more it turns out to be hot, denser and less variable.(Source: NASA / STSCI / A. FELID).

The expanding universe not only makes the distance between things go further and further, but also makes the wavelength gradually spread out in the footsteps of us traveling to the time ahead. Because the wavelength determines energy (shorter wavelengths have more energy), that means the Universe's temperature decreases with time and so everything has been hotter in the past. Extrapolating this far enough away from the past, you will come to a point where things are so hot that you can't even form neutral atoms. If this hypothesis is correct, we will see that the radiation of remnants today, in all directions, has cooled only a few degrees above absolute zero. This cosmic microwave background was discovered by Arno Penzias and Bob Wilson in 1964 as a convincing confirmation for the Big Bang hypothesis.

According to Penzias and Wilson's initial observations, the galactic plane emits a number of astrophysical sources of radioactivity (center), but at the top and bottom, all that remains is a radiation background. homogeneous almost perfect.(Source: NASA WMAP science research team).

Therefore, it is interesting to continue extrapolating back in time, when the Universe is even smaller and hotter. If you continue to reverse extrapolation, you will see:

1. A time when the Universe was too hot to form an atomic nucleus, and the radiation was so hot that any link between protons and neutrons was exploded.
2. A time when material and non-material pairs can form themselves, when the Universe is so energetic that particle / antiparticle pairs can be created naturally.
3. A time when separate protons and neutrons decay into a quark-gluon plasma state, when the temperature and density are so high that the Universe becomes denser than the region inside an atomic nucleus.
4. And finally, a time when density and temperature increase to infinite values, when all matter and energy in the Universe is contained in a single point: the singular knot .

This last point - the bizarre knot is where the laws of physics are broken - now considered the source of space and time. This is Big Bang's last idea.

If we extrapolate very far, we get to the hotter states at the earlier time.Is this the final state of the singular knot, where the laws of physics break down?(Source: NASA / CXC / M.WEISS).

Of course, everything, except the last point on, was confirmed to be true! We have created quark-gluon plasma and antimatter pair in the laboratory; as well as calculating the light elements that were formed and the abundance at the beginning of the Universe, made measurements and found that they all fit the predictions from the Big Bang. Further, we measured the fluctuations of the cosmic microwave background and looked at how attractive binding structures such as the formation and development of stars and galaxies. Observing all of these things, we all found great unity between theory and observation. Big Bang seems to be the answer to the question of the formation of the Universe.

Density fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background provide seeds that form the modern cosmic structure, including stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, dividing lines and large-scale radiation gaps.(Source: CHRIS BLAKE AND SAM MOORFIELD).

However, there are still some differences in some aspects. The following three special things you would expect from Big Bang did not happen. Specifically:

1. 1. The Universe's temperature is the same in different directions, although an area that is billions of light years away in one direction is never (since Big Bang) interacting or exchanging information with a zone billions of light years in the opposite direction.
2. 2. The universe with no measured space curvature is different from zero, although the universe is completely flat in space requires a perfect balance between initial expansion and material density and radiation.
3. 3. The universe no longer exists any residual high energy remnants from the earliest times, although the temperature can produce these remnants already existed if the Universe had been so hot .

The theorists studying this issue began to think of hypotheses to replace a Big Bang's "bizarre knot" , as well as what could recreate the hot, dense and cooling state in when others avoid mentioning these issues. In December 1979, Alan Guth found the answer.

In a bulging Universe, energy is inherent in space, causing exponential expansion.There is always a zero probability that the inflation process will end (indicated by a red 'X') at any time, leading to the hot dense state of the universe full of matter and radiation.But in areas where no end is taking place, space continues to swell.(Source: BEYOND GALAXY - Author: E. SIEGEL).

Instead of a random hot solid state, the Universe can start from a state of no matter, no radiation, no antimatter, no neutrinos, and any particle. All the energy in the Universe can be closely linked to the space grid itself: a form of vacuum energy, which causes the Universe to expand at an exponential rate. In this cosmic state, quantum fluctuations still exist, and so as space expands, these vibrations will last across the Universe, creating regions with more average energy density or a little less. And finally, when this big ballooning phase of the universe ends, that energy will be transformed into matter and radiation, creating a hot dense state similar to the Big Bang.

Quantum fluctuations inherent in space, spread throughout the universe in the process of bulging, leaving traces of density fluctuation on the cosmic microwave background, leading to the emergence of stars. , galaxies and other vast structures in the Universe today.(Source: Author E. SIEGEL, Photo: FROM PLANCK'S GLASSES OF THE EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY AND AGENCY MISSION OF NSF IN VIRUS / NASA / ENERGY RESOURCES RESEARCH).

This is considered a fascinating idea but still speculative, but there is a way to test. If we can measure the fluctuations in the Big Bang remnant light, and they show a specific model that is consistent with the prediction process, it will be a decisive evidence for the process. bulge. Moreover, that fluctuation would have to be very small for the Universe to never reach the temperature needed to produce high energy remnants, and much smaller than the temperature and density that space and time Time appears from singularity. In the 1990s and 2000s, and then again in the 2010s, we measured those fluctuations in detail and found this to be accurate.

The fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background, measured in COBE (on a large scale), WMAP (on the medium range) and Planck (on a small scale), are consistent with not only having a real turn the scale of quantum fluctuations, but the magnitude is so small that it cannot create random hot condensed states.(Source: NASA / WMAP SCAMENCE TEAM).

The obvious conclusion is: it certainly happened, but did not expand to return to the random hot condensed state. Instead, the Universe from earlier had spent a period of time before all energy constituted matter and radiation today, instead closely related to the space grid of the Universe itself. cylinder. That stage, known as the cosmic bulge, ended and formed the Big Bang, but never created a random hot solid state nor created a singularity. What happened before the Universe swelled - or whether the bulge of the universe has eternity in the past - is still an open question, but one thing is certain: Big Bang is not the beginning. of the universe !