Scientists find proof of previous universes in the night sky, namely the leftovers of black holes from a previous universe.
According to New Scientist, the concept is based on something known as conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). What it means is that our universe, rather than beginning with a single Big Bang, goes through continual cycles of Big Bangs and compressions.
While the vast majority of the cosmos would be annihilated from one cycle to the next, these scientists claim that some electromagnetic radiation may survive the recycling process. Their findings have been published on arXiv.
“What we claim we’re seeing is the final remnant after a black hole has evaporated away in the previous aeon,” University of Oxford mathematical physicist Roger Penrose, a co-author on the study and co-creator of CCC theory, told New Scientist.
The evidence is presented in the form of “Hawking points,” which are named after the late Stephen Hawking. He hypothesised that black holes would release Hawking radiation, which Penrose and his colleagues claim may travel from one universe to the next.
They believe Hawking points might arise in the cosmic microwave background, which is the leftover radiation from the Big Bang (CMB). On the CMB map, hawking spots would appear as rings of light known as B-modes.
Previously, it was considered that these aberrant locations in the CMB were created by gravitational waves or interstellar dust. However, Penrose and his colleagues believe their theory may give an exciting response, and one such Hawking point may have already been discovered by the BICEP2 project, which aims to map the CMB.
“Though seemingly problematic for cosmic inflation, the existence of such anomalous points is an implication of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC),” the team wrote in their paper.
“Although of extremely low temperature at emission, in CCC this radiation is enormously concentrated by the conformal compression of the entire future of the black hole, resulting in a single point at the crossover into our current aeon.”
The recycling universe idea is not without debate. The majority of our data imply that the universe’s expansion is accelerating, with the cosmos not being dense enough to condense back into a single point and expand again – a notion known as the Big Bounce.
