(ORDO NEWS) — We do not live in the first universe. A group of physicists said that other universes existed before us, in other eons
Like ours, these universes were full of black holes. And we can detect traces of these long-dead black holes in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), the radioactive remnant of our universe’s violent birth.
At least, that is the somewhat eccentric view of a group of theorists, including the eminent mathematical physicist at Oxford University, Roger Penrose (also an important collaborator of Stephen Hawking). Penrose and his assistants claim that this is a modified version of the Big Bang.
In Penrose’s history of space and time (what physicists call conformal cyclic cosmology, or CCC), universes successively explode, expand, and die, and the black holes from each leave traces in the universes.
A new paper published Aug. 6 in the preprint journal arXiv provides clear evidence for Hawking dots in the CMB sky. Penrose, along with SUNY mathematician Daniel Ahn and Warsaw University theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner, argue that these traces are visible in existing CMB data.
Daniel Ahn explained how these footprints are formed and persist from one eon to the next.
“If the universe goes on and on and black holes gobble everything up, then at some point we’ll be left with only black holes,”.
According to Hawking’s most famous theory, black holes slowly lose some of their mass and energy over time due to the emission of massless particles called gravitons and photons. If this Hawking radiation exists, “then what will happen is that these black holes will gradually, gradually shrink.”
At some point, these black holes will completely disintegrate, Ahn said, leaving a massless soup of photons and gravitons in the universe.
“The point is that massless gravitons and photons don’t really feel either time or space,” he said.
Gravitons and photons, massless travelers at the speed of light, do not experience time and space in the same way that we do – and all other massive, slowly moving objects in the universe.
According to Einstein’s theory of relativity, objects with mass move slower in time as they approach the speed of light, and distances are distorted from their point of view. Massless objects like photons and gravitons move at the speed of light, so they have no sense of time or distance at all.
“Therefore, a universe filled with only gravitons or photons would have no concept of time and space,” An says.
At this point, say some physicists (including Penrose), the vast, empty universe after the black hole begins to resemble the super-compressed universe at the moment of the Big Bang, where there is neither time nor distance between anything.
“And then everything starts all over again,” An said.
So, if the new universe does not contain black holes from the previous universe, how can these black holes leave traces in the CMB?
Penrose believes it’s not the black holes themselves that leave traces, but the billions of years it took these objects to release energy into their own universe via Hawking radiation.
“This is not a singularity of a black hole,” he said in an interview with Live Science, “and not a real physical body,” but … all the Hawking radiation of the hole in its entire history.
Here’s what that means: every time a black hole dissolves with Hawking radiation, it leaves a trail behind it. And this label, made at the frequencies of the background radiation of space, can survive the death of the Universe.
If researchers could detect this mark, then scientists would have reason to believe that the vision of the universe proposed by the CCC is correct, or at least not necessarily wrong.
To detect this faint trail against the already faint CMB entangled emission, Ahn said he ran a sort of statistical tournament among patches of the sky.
Ahn took round regions in the third part of the sky where galaxies and starlight do not overwhelm the CMB. He then identified regions where the microwave frequency distribution matches what would be expected if Hawking points existed.
These circles “competed” with each other to determine which area best matched the expected spectra of Hawking’s dots, he said.
He then compared this data to fake CMB data that he had randomly generated. This trick was done in order to eliminate the possibility that these preliminary “Hawking points” could form if the CMB were completely random.
If the randomly generated CMB data failed to mimic these Hawking points, then this is strong evidence that the newly identified Hawking points do indeed belong to black holes from past epochs.
When Penrose was asked if black holes from our universe could ever leave traces in the universe of the next eon, he replied: “Yes, of course!”
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