A NEW START OF THE UNIVERSE

How did the universe start? Every time we get a major breakthrough in understanding, as soon as a monumental theory is developed, people get busy trying to tear it down and come up with the “real” answer to replace it. And so it goes with the Big Bang.

Image: Courtesy of Candu in Search of Truth.

According to the Big Bang model, the Universe exploded out of an infinitely dense point, or singularity. But if it’s true and it did happen, what triggered it? The known laws of physics cannot tell us what happened at that moment.

 

No theory has ever nailed down all of the answers. Several new theories are emerging that claim that the Big Bang couldn’t have happened.

Image: Courtesy of NASA. What happens after supernova.

If the universe had no beginning, for example, the idea of a cosmic explosion occuring from an infinitely dense point of singularity doesn’t fit. Rainbow Gravity is a theory that subscribes to this infinite time notion.

 

Originally proposed 10 years ago, Rainbow Gravity is getting new attention with the recent application of this theory to the question of how the universe began.

Image: Courtesy of BBC.Voc.

The concept of Rainbow Gravity is that gravity’s effects on spacetime are experienced differently by different wavelengths of light (which have different colors). And if this is true, then there could not have been a point of singularity, and therefore, no source for the Big Bang.

  

Since the color of light is determined by its frequency, and this corresponds to different energies, different colored photons (particles of light) would travel on slightly different paths through space time.

Image: Courtesy of NASA.

"Particles with different energies will actually see different spacetimes, different gravitational fields," says Adel Awad of the Center for Theoretical Physics at Zewail City of Science and Technology in Egypt, who led the new research. The study was published in October in the Journal of Cosmology and Astroparticle Physics.

Image: Courtesy of NASA. Gamma ray burst.

The effects would usually be tiny, so that we wouldn't notice the difference but with the extreme energies released by stellar explosions, or gamma-ray bursts, we could detect it. Advances in astronomy scopes and instruments are just now beginning to offer the sensitivity needed to measure these effects.

 

Quantum gravity is another framework. Relative locality is a similar concept. The debate over how the universe got its beautiful start has not ended. Researchers are now planning to analyze gamma-ray bursts and other cosmic phenomena for signs of rainbow gravity effects.

Photo: Courtesy of NASA. Artist’s rendition of a black hole.

Here’s another new idea about how our universal party started.

 

A team led by Niayesh Afshordi, an astrophysicist at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada published a paper on September 5th 2013, that claims that the Big Bang was just a mirage created by the collapse of a higher-dimensional star.

Image: Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech.

The Universe might have formed from the debris that ejected when a 4 dimensional star (3D + Time), collapsed into a 4D black hole. Imagine a 4D supernova scenario. That might explain why the Universe is so uniform in temperature and nature in all directions.

Image: Ute Kraus & Axel Mellinger via Space Time Travel. Black hole bending nearby light.

In a recent paper posted on the arXiv preprint server, Afshordi and his colleagues cite a model proposed by Gia Dvali, a physicist now at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, Germany. In that model, our three-dimensional (3D) Universe is a membrane, or brane, that floats through a ‘bulk universe’ that has four spatial dimensions and 4D stars.

Image: Rogilbert. D-branes.

While a 3D black hole is bounded by a 2D surface, called an event horizon, a 4D black hole is bounded by a 3D shape called a hypersphere. When Afshordi’s team modelled the death of a 4D star, they found that the ejected material would form a 3D membrane, or brane, surrounding that 3D event horizon, and slowly expand to form our Universe.

 

Paper: http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.1487

Photo: Courtesy of Master Ceramics.

Read more about Beautiful Starts, as they relate to Arts/Design, Nature/Science, Food/Drink, Place/Time, Mind/Body, and Soul/Impact, including 10 New Books Full of Sparks, in our posts throughout this week.

 

Enter this week’s BN Competition. Our theme this week is Beautiful Starts. Send in your images and ideas. Deadline is 01.12.14.

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