All articles tagged with #big bang
Physicists at the LHC's CMS collaboration watched a high-energy quark traverse quark-gluon plasma by using Z bosons as a clean directional tag. They observed a subtle less-than-1% dip in backward-produced hadrons, consistent with a wake in the primordial soup and offering new insight into the liquid-like properties of the early-universe plasma.
Physicists propose the Boltzmann Brain hypothesis: given enough time, random fluctuations could create a brain with all your memories, making our recollections potentially illusory. In a paper in Entropy, lead author David Wolpert and co-authors Carlo Rovelli and Jordan Scharnhorst argue this is a plausible consequence of physics, though there’s no rigorous way to prove or disprove it. They connect the idea to thermodynamics and argue that grounding our sense of time still rests on the Big Bang, concluding we shouldn’t panic, but the notion challenges the reliability of memory as a reflection of past reality.
A new study reframes the Einstein–Rosen bridge from a travel conduit to a time-symmetric link that preserves unitarity in curved spacetime, suggesting wormholes aren’t cosmic tunnels, potentially resolves the black hole information paradox, and portrays the Big Bang as a quantum bounce between opposing arrows of time with possible connections to dark matter.
The universe, originating from the Big Bang about 14 billion years ago, is expected to continue expanding, with star formation ceasing and galaxies merging into larger elliptical galaxies over trillions of years. Ultimately, the universe may fade into darkness, driven by dark energy, but its exact future remains uncertain and open to new discoveries.
A recent study suggests that particle interactions within the first second after the Big Bang could have led to the formation of various exotic objects such as black holes, boson stars, and cannibal stars, indicating a complex and rich early universe phenomenology.
Recent cosmological research suggests that understanding the universe's ultimate fate—whether it will end in a Big Crunch, Big Freeze, or a cyclical Big Bounce—could provide insights into what preceded the Big Bang, especially with new evidence indicating that dark energy may not be constant but evolving over time, possibly involving particles called axions that influence cosmic expansion.
Astronomers may have identified the first observed system of Population III stars, the primordial stars formed shortly after the Big Bang, based on detailed analysis of JWST data of galaxy LAP1-B, which matches key theoretical predictions, though further confirmation is needed.
Physicists have measured the temperature of quark-gluon plasma, a state of matter from moments after the Big Bang, reaching trillions of Kelvin, providing new insights into the early universe's conditions and advancing understanding of matter under extreme temperatures.
Atoms formed primarily from hydrogen and helium shortly after the Big Bang as the universe cooled, with heavier atoms created later in stars through fusion and in supernova explosions, while dark matter remains a mystery.
The article explains that the universe could not have expanded forever into the past due to the implications of the Borde-Guth-Vilenkin theorem, which shows that inflationary spacetimes are past-timelike-incomplete, meaning they cannot be eternal and must have had some initial state, possibly a singularity or a different pre-inflationary condition.
The article discusses the uncertainties surrounding the maximum temperature of the early universe during the Big Bang, highlighting how cosmic inflation and observational data from the cosmic microwave background help constrain this temperature, which is estimated to be between 10^24 and 10^28 Kelvin, well below the Planck scale.
A new study proposes that gravitational waves, rather than the traditional inflation theory, could explain the universe's origins, offering a simpler and more verifiable model based on Einstein's general relativity and De Sitter space, potentially reshaping our understanding of the early universe.
A new study suggests our universe may be inside a black hole that experienced a 'Big Bounce' instead of a traditional Big Bang, potentially explaining cosmic inflation and dark energy without extra assumptions. The model proposes the universe's origin as a rebound from a collapsing black hole, with testable predictions like slight curvature and relic black holes, opening new avenues for understanding cosmic origins.
France's Apollon facility has set a world record with a 10 petawatt laser, the most powerful on Earth, used to simulate early-universe conditions and advance scientific research, outpacing the US and other nations in power and reliability.
The sPHENIX detector at Brookhaven National Laboratory has successfully tested a new technology that captures detailed data from high-energy collisions, helping scientists better understand the universe's earliest moments and the elusive quark-gluon plasma formed shortly after the Big Bang, marking a significant advancement in cosmic research.