Another big bang could have taken place. The universe's radiation and particles could have been accompanied by another big bang that filled the cosmos with particles of dark matter.
Origins of the Universe
According to Science Alert, the standard cosmological view of the early universe was that it was quite exotic. Among the many mysterious events that took place in the cosmos, inflation could be the most mysterious. Inflation took place at earlier times after the Big Bang enabled the universe to enter an epoch of fast expansion.
When this inflation stopped, the exotic quantum fields behind the event ended up decaying. They turned into radiation and particles that are present today.
Science Alert reports that when the age of the universe was less than 20 minutes, the particles started assembling into the first neutrons and protons. This is referred to as Big Bang Nucleosynthesis.
According to the Universe Today, big bang nucleosynthesis is one of the pillars of cosmology. The calculations that back it up have the capacity to accurately project the helium and hydrogen quantities within the cosmos.
However, despite current understanding regarding the early universe, dark matter is still a mysterious subject. This dark matter is invisible and mysterious, and it takes up remarkable mass across the universe.
While standard notions hold that big bang models led to dark matter creation, a research team has brought another idea to the table. They propose that big bang nucleosynthesis and inflation were not the only periods that took place.
Dark Big Bang
Science Alert reports that dark matter could have evolved along a completely different trajectory. While decay happened after the end of inflation, this was not the case for dark matter. There is still a quantum field across the cosmos that did not decay.
As the universe kept on expanding and cooling, this quantum field eventually transformed itself and triggered dark matter formation.
What makes this approach advantageous is that it distinguishes the evolution of dark matter from that of normal matter. Hence, big bang nucleosynthesis may take place as dark matter evolves separately.
Popular Mechanics reports that this is a possible explanation for the reason why scientists have never spotted non-gravitational interactions of normal matter and dark matter. Other than this, the approach reveals new opportunities to delve into different theories of dark matter because of its separate track of evolution.
On top of this, the researchers also discovered that the dark big bang's appearance may have led to distinct gravitational waves that would have persisted up until the universe today. Ongoing projects, such as pulsar timing arrays, should be capable of picking up such gravitational waves, if they indeed exist.
Though scientists still do not know if the dark big bang indeed took place, this work offers a path to putting the idea to test.
RELATED ARTICLE: Scientists Say Atomic Clocks Near Sun May Help Find Dark Matter, New Physics
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