Tag Archives | Big Bang Theory

Astronomers Find First Evidence Of Other Universes

By on December 17, 2010 in News 52

Eternal InflationAmazing to think the universe has “cosmic bruises.” Via Technology Review’s Physics arXiv blog:

There’s something exciting afoot in the world of cosmology. Last month, Roger Penrose at the University of Oxford and Vahe Gurzadyan at Yerevan State University in Armenia announced that they had found patterns of concentric circles in the cosmic microwave background, the echo of the Big Bang.

This, they say, is exactly what you’d expect if the universe were eternally cyclical. By that, they mean that each cycle ends with a big bang that starts the next cycle. In this model, the universe is a kind of cosmic Russian Doll, with all previous universes contained within the current one.

That’s an extraordinary discovery: evidence of something that occurred before the (conventional) Big Bang.

Today, another group says they’ve found something else in the echo of the Big Bang. These guys start with a different model of the universe called eternal inflation.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 52

Large Hadron Collider Creates Mini ‘Big Bangs’

By on November 8, 2010 in News 2

Our universe was created after the occurrence of the Big Bang. Humans have successfully reenacted mini Big Bangs. Does this mean we could create mini universes? From The Telegraph:

The reaction created temperatures a million times hotter than the centre of the Sun, which have not been reached since the first billionths of a second following the Big Bang.

The heavyweight particle collisions follow seven months of earlier experiments crashing protons – which are 200 times lighter than lead ions – at near-light speeds.

The collisions were produced by firing lead ions – atoms with their electrons removed – at incredible speeds in opposite directions around the LHC’s underground tunnel at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, near Geneva.

This was expected to cause atomic particles such as protons and neutrons to melt, producing a “soup” of matter in a state previously unseen on Earth.

Scientists, including British particle physicists, will now study the particles in the hope of discovering what holds atoms together and gives them their mass.

… Read the rest

Continue Reading · 2