Cosmos may provide clues to events before Big Bang

LONDON - Cosmos may provide some clues into events that happened before the Big Bang, according to an expert.

Renowned cosmologist Roger Penrose said that the evidence of events that happened before the Big Bang could be seen in the glow of microwave radiation that fills the Universe.

The events appear as “rings” around galaxy clusters in which the variation in the background is unusually low.

His theory upends the largely held view that the Universe was shaped by an unthinkably large and fast expansion from a single point.

“In the scheme that I’m proposing, you have an exponential expansion but it’s not in our aeon - I use the term to describe [the period] from our Big Bang until the remote future,” the BBC quoted Penrose as saying.

“I claim that this aeon is one of a succession of such things, where the remote future of the previous aeons somehow becomes the Big Bang of our aeon,” Penrose added.

This “conformal cyclic cosmology” (CCC) that Professor Penrose advocates allows that the laws of nature may evolve with time, but precludes the need to institute a theoretical beginning to the Universe.

His team surveyed nearly 11,000 locations, looking for directions in the sky where, at some point in the past, vast galaxies circling one another may have collided.

The supermassive black holes at their centres would have merged, turning some of their mass into tremendous bursts of energy. The CCC theory holds that the same object may have undergone the same processes more than once in history, and each would have sent a “shockwave” of energy propagating outward.

The search turned up 12 candidates that showed concentric circles - representing unexpected order in a vast sky of disorder - represent pre-Big Bang events, toward the end of the last “aeon”.

“Inflation [theory] is supposed to have ironed all of these irregularities out,” said Penrose.

“How do you suddenly get something that is making these whacking big explosions just before inflation turns off? To my way of thinking that’s pretty hard to make sense of.”

Shaun Cole of the University of Durham’s computational cosmology group, said, “It’s a revolutionary theory and here there appears to be some data that supports it.”

Penrose and Cole both said that the idea should be shored up by further analyses of this type, in particular with data that will soon be available from the Planck telescope, designed to study the microwave background with unprecedented precision. (ANI)