the the great explosion It may have been accompanied by a shadow, the “dark” Big Bang that shrouded the universe in mystery dark matter, cosmologists suggested in a new study. We may be able to see evidence of this event by studying the ripples in the fabric of space-time.
after the great explosionMost cosmologists believe that the universe went through a period of rapid and remarkable expansion in its early moments, known as inflation. Nobody knows the cause of inflationbut it is necessary to explain a variety of notes, such as extreme Geometric flatness of the universe By large scales.
It is assumed that inflation was driven by some strange quantum field, which is a fundamental entity that absorbs all space-time. At the end of inflation, this field decays into a shower of particles and radiation, resulting in the “hot big bang” that physicists usually associate with the beginning of the universe. These particles would continue to coalesce into the first atoms when the universe was about 12 minutes old and – hundreds of millions of years later – begin to coalesce into stars and galaxies.
But there is another component to the cosmic mix: dark matter. Again, cosmologists aren’t sure what dark matter is, but they see evidence of its existence through the effect of gravity on ordinary matter.
In the simplest models, the end of inflation and the hot Big Bang that followed also flooded the universe with dark matter, which evolved along an independent trajectory. But that assumption was made just for the sake of simplicity, two cosmologists suggested in a research paper published in February in Database Preprint. arXiv (Opens in a new tab). Scientists don’t see any evidence of dark matter until later in the evolution of the universe, after the elusive matter has had time to exert its gravitational influence, so there’s no need to populate the universe in the hot Big Bang along with normal matter. Theme. In addition, since dark matter does not interact with normal matter, it may have had its own “dark” Big Bang, the researchers claim.
The dark big bang
In their paper, the researchers explored what a dark big bang would look like. First, they hypothesized the existence of a new quantum field – the so-called “dark field”, which is necessary to allow dark matter to form completely independently.
In this new scenario, the dark big bang begins only after inflation fades and the universe expands and cools enough to force the dark field into its own phase transition, transforming itself into dark matter particles.
The researchers found that the dark big bang had to obey some limitations; If it’s too early, there will be a lot of dark matter today, and if it’s too late, there will be too little. But if the dark big bang occurred when the universe was less than a month old, it could agree with all known observations.
Introducing Dark Big Bang has many advantages. First, it’s consistent with what scientists know about dark matter: If it doesn’t interact with ordinary matter, it need not share a common origin. Second, it allows researchers to create models of dark matter without having to worry about how it might affect the behavior of normal matter at very early times, giving scientists more flexibility in creating models.
But more importantly, the researchers found that the dark Big Bang produces a specific signal in gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time that still circulate around the universe today. This means that the theory could be testable one day.
The researchers acknowledge that current gravitational-wave experiments are not sensitive to finding signals of the dark Big Bang. But there is another gravitational-wave probe that uses the distances to distant pulsars, known as pulsar timing arrays such as NANOGrav experiment (Opens in a new tab)he might just be able to pull off the trick.
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