A team of researchers from Stockholm University in Sweden has just proposed a revolutionary idea: the Big Bang was not the only big event at the beginning of the Universe, but it could have been accompanied by a second Big Bang just a few weeks later. a 'dark Big Bang' that flooded the Universe with dark matter particles. According to Katherine Freese and Martin Wolfgang Winkler, whose work can be consulted on the arXiv server, the idea could also be tested experimentally. In the standard picture of cosmology, the early Universe was a really strange place, in which the most important thing after the Big Bang was an inflation event that pushed the entire Universe into a period of extremely rapid expansion. When inflation ended, the exotic quantum fields that had driven that event decayed, transforming into the avalanche of particles and radiation that we can still observe today. Less than 20 minutes after the Big Bang, these particles began to come together to form the first protons and neutrons during what scientists have called 'Cosmological' or 'Big Bang' nucleosynthesis, one of the pillars of current theories, since allows you to accurately predict the amount of hydrogen and helium in the cosmos. Standard Related News If they find, near the Big Bang, a galaxy that forms stars at a rate 1,000 times faster than the Milky Way José Manuel Nieves At its center, there is a new type of supermassive black hole, never observed until now However, no All that glitters is gold, and despite the success of our image of the early Universe, we still do not understand dark matter, that 'other form' of matter that is five times more abundant than ordinary matter (of which stars are made and galaxies) and which in total represents about 27% of the mass of the Universe (another 5% is normal matter and the remaining 68% is dark energy). The dominant idea is that the same processes that gave rise to particles and radiation must have also generated dark matter at the same time. After which, dark matter, which does not interact with ordinary matter or emit any radiation, simply continued on its way, ignoring everything else. An independent path But Freese and Wolfgang Winkler propose something very different in their article: inflation and nucleosynthesis of the Big Bang were not the only things that happened at the beginning of the Universe, and dark matter could have evolved along a completely different trajectory. separated. In this new scenario, at the end of inflation the Universe was indeed flooded with 'normal' particles and radiation, but not with dark matter. In its place, some quantum field remained that did not decay. Then, as the universe expanded and cooled, that additional quantum field also transformed, giving rise to the formation of dark matter. The advantage of this approach is that it decouples the evolution of dark matter from conventional matter, so that Big Bang nucleosynthesis can continue to occur as we currently understand it, while it is dark matter that evolves over time. an independent path. The new theory also opens up avenues to explore a wide variety of theoretical dark matter models because, with its own evolutionary trajectory, it is easier to follow in calculations to see how well it matches observations. For example, Freese and Wolfgang Winkler were able to determine that if there really was a Dark Big Bang, it had to happen when the Universe was less than a month old. The research also found that this 'second Big Bang' had to generate a unique form of gravitational waves, ripples in the very fabric of space-time that, in addition, should persist in the current universe and could be detected in some of the ongoing experiments. . MORE INFORMATION news No What time is it on the Moon? They ask that it have its own time zone news No The Juno spacecraft sends the clearest images of Jupiter's moon Io If these gravitational waves are detected, the theory will be confirmed and we will have a Universe with two different Big bangs.
