Scientists claim the Big Bang theory is WRONG - as they reveal how the universe really began
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For decades, almost every scientist has agreed that the universe began in an enormous explosion known as the Big Bang.
But one group of researchers now controversially claims that everything we think about the birth of the cosmos might be wrong.
In a radical new research paper, Professor Enrique Gaztanaga, of the University of Portsmouth and his co-authors have proposed a new theory they call the 'Black Hole Universe'.
They claim that the universe was formed by a gravitational crunch, forming a massive black hole that then 'bounced' outwards.
Professor Gaztanaga claims this theory can explain everything we know about the structure of the universe without the need for any exotic elements such as dark energy.
Importantly, the theory also predicts that space should be slightly curved rather than completely flat as the Big Bang model suggests.
This is something that current NASA missions such as Euclid may soon be able to confirm, possibly offering a strong hint that the Black Hole Universe theory is correct.
However, the Black Hole Universe theory may also have some staggeringly strange consequences for humanity's place in the universe.
According to the Big Bang theory, before the universe as we know it came to be, all the matter that currently exists was packed into an infinitely dense point called a 'singularity'.
From this point, around 13.8 billion years ago, the universe exploded outwards in an extraordinarily rapid phase of expansion known as cosmic inflation.
The shape etched into matter as that initial explosion cooled laid out the patterns that would become stars, galaxies, and even larger structures like galactic superclusters.
Since then, as observations from space telescopes like Hubble have shown, the universe has been expanding outwards at a steadily accelerating rate.
This so-called 'standard model of cosmology' works well for explaining many big questions such as why galaxies are where they are, but Professor Gaztanaga wasn't satisfied.
The problem was that the standard model only works well when scientists make some big assumptions about how the world might work.
For example, to explain why the universe is still accelerating scientists have been forced to add mysterious 'dark energy' to the picture - a force that is pushing against gravity but has never been directly observed.
So, instead of looking at the expanding universe and trying to work out where it comes from, the researchers looked at what happens when matter collapses in on itself.
When large stars collapse in on themselves, they form black holes - objects so dense that not even light can escape their gravitational pull.
According to the standard view proposed by Stephen Hawking and British physicist Roger Penrose, when this happens gravity squishes matter down into an infinitely dense point.
This would mean that singularities, like the one in the Big Bang theory, are a natural and inevitable part of the universe.
However, some scientists now think that the rules of quantum physics mean you can't keep squishing matter together forever.
According to quantum physics, you can't pin down a quantum particle to a single point and two particles can't occupy the exact same location.
This means that black holes must stop collapsing before gravity squishes matter into a single infinitely dense point.
Professor Gaztanaga told MailOnline: 'Infinities may appear in mathematics, but they have no physical meaning. Nature doesn’t work with infinite masses or infinite precision.'
Therefore, when a cloud of matter like the universe collapses under gravity it will squeeze on itself until it forms a black hole before hitting this limit and bouncing back.
What forms out of that bounce is a universe which looks remarkably like our own, suggesting this could be a possible way our universe began.
Professor Gaztanaga says this Black Hole Universe Theory is better than the Big Bang because it solves some 'major questions the Big Bang model leaves unanswered'.
Most importantly, this theory gives a natural explanation for the two phases of the universe's expansion: the rapid phase of cosmic expansion and the later acceleration we are now observing.
According to the researchers' mathematical solutions, both of these phases emerge from the physics of the bounce itself rather than from other factors like dark energy.
Professor Gaztanaga says: 'Inflation is simply part of the same dynamical process - the collapse and bounce - so it doesn’t need to be added as a separate mechanism.'
However, this theory has some fairly wild consequences for our understanding of the universe as a whole.
According to the Black Hole Universe, the entire observable universe is inside a black hole nested inside a large parent universe which could, itself, be inside another black hole.
Professor Gaztanaga says: 'We don’t know for sure, but the theory allows for black holes within black holes - a nested, possibly endless structure.
'The key insight is that our universe may not be the beginning of everything. We are not unique, just part of a larger system.
'It’s a continuation of the Copernican principle: Earth is not the centre of the cosmos, our galaxy is not the only one, and our universe may not be either.'
Critically, the Black Hole Universe theory makes predictions about the shape of the universe that we should soon be able to test.
The researchers say that the 'smoking gun' would be that the structure of the universe should be ever so slightly curved.
That would mean the angles in a giant cosmic triangle would add up to slightly less than the 180 degrees that they would make on a flat surface.
Soon, with space telescopes such as Euclid or the European Space Agency's upcoming is ARRAKIHS mission scientists will be able to see whether this is true, potentially re-writing our understanding of the universe.
THE BIG BANG THEORY DESCRIBES THE BEGINNING AND EVOLUTION OF THE UNIVERSE
The Big Bang Theory is a cosmological model, a theory used to describe the beginning and the evolution of our universe.
It says that the universe was in a very hot and dense state before it started to expand 13,7 billion years ago.
This theory is based on fundamental observations.
In 1920, Hubble observed that the distance between galaxies was increasing everywhere in the universe.
This means that galaxies had to be closer to each other in the past.
In 1964, Wilson and Penzias discovered the cosmic background radiation, which is a like a fossil of radiation emitted during the beginning of the universe, when it was hot and dense.
The cosmic background radiation is observable everywhere in the universe.
The composition of the universe - that is, the the number of atoms of different elements - is consistent with the Big Bang Theory.
So far, this theory is the only one that can explain why we observe an abundance of primordial elements in the universe.
