(ORDO NEWS) — The Big Bang may not have been alone. The appearance of all particles and radiation in the Universe may have been joined by another Big Bang, which flooded our Universe with particles of dark matter.
Perhaps the most important event that took place in our cosmos was inflation (the expansion stage of the Universe), which in the early days after the Big Bang sent our Universe into a period of extremely rapid expansion.
When inflation ended, the exotic quantum fields that led to this event disintegrated into the stream of particles and radiation that remains today.
When the universe was less than 20 minutes old, these particles began to assemble into the first protons and neutrons during what we call Big Bang nucleosynthesis.
Big Bang nucleosynthesis is the foundation of modern cosmology, as the calculations behind it accurately predict the amount of hydrogen and helium in space.
However, despite the current understanding of the initial stage of the formation of the Universe, we still do not understand dark matter, which is a mysterious and invisible form of matter that occupies the vast majority of the mass in space.
The Standard Big Bang Models show that any process that produces particles and radiation also creates dark matter. And after that, the dark matter was just around, ignoring everyone else.
But a team of researchers came up with a new idea. They argue that the Big Bang eras of inflation and nucleosynthesis were not alone.
Dark matter may have evolved along a completely separate path. In this scenario, when inflation ended, it was still flooding the universe with particles and radiation. But not dark matter.
Instead, some quantum field remained, which did not disappear. As the universe expanded and cooled , this additional quantum field eventually transformed, causing dark matter to form.
The advantage of this approach is that it separates the evolution of dark matter from ordinary matter, so that Big Bang nucleosynthesis can proceed as we currently understand it, while dark matter evolves along a separate path.
The study also showed that the advent of the Dark Big Bang gave rise to a very unique signature of strong gravitational waves that will persist in the modern universe.
Current experiments, such as pulsar time arrays, should be able to detect these gravitational waves, if they exist.
We still don’t know if Large Dark Matter originated, but this work provides a clear path to testing the idea.
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