A new study suggests that within a month of the Big Bang, a second explosion may have given the universe invisible dark matter.
Cosmologists have suggested in a new study that the Big Bang may have been accompanied by a shadow, the Big Bang that filled our universe with mysterious dark matter . And we can see evidence for that by studying the ripples in the fabric of space-time.
This Hubble Telescope image of the galaxy cluster Cl0024+1654, shows small red dots of stars above a blue dark matter field.
After the Big Bang , most cosmologists assumed that the universe went through a period of rapid expansion, notable in its earliest moments, known as inflation . No one knows what caused the inflation, but various observations, such as the extreme geometric flatness of the universe, need to be explained.
Inflation is probably driven by some strange quantum field, which is a fundamental entity that pervades all of spacetime . At the end of inflation, that field decays into a shower of particles and radiation, triggering the “Hot Big Bang” that physicists often associate with the beginning of the universe. Those particles would continue to recombine into the first atoms when the universe was about 12 minutes old and – hundreds of millions of years later – began to coalesce into stars and galaxies.
But there is another ingredient in the cosmic mix: dark matter. Again, cosmologists aren’t sure what dark matter is, but they see evidence of its existence through its gravitational influence on ordinary matter.
Scientists saw no evidence of dark matter until much later in the evolution of the universe, after the elusive substance had had enough time to exert a gravitational influence, so it wouldn’t be necessary for it to fill the universe in the hot Big Bang along with the normal event. Plus, because dark matter doesn’t interact with normal matter, it may have had its own Dark Big Bang, the researchers claim.
Big Black Explosion
In their paper, the researchers discovered what a dark Big Bang looks like. First, they hypothesized the existence of a new quantum field, the so-called “dark field” , which is needed to allow dark matter to form completely independently.
In this new scenario, the Dark Big Bang takes place only after the inflation has disappeared and the universe has expanded and cooled enough to force the dark field into its own phase transition, where it transforms itself. into dark matter particles.
The researchers found that the Dark Big Bang was subject to certain constraints. If it is too early, there will be too much dark matter today, and if it is too late, there will be too little. But if the Dark Big Bang occurred when the universe was less than a month into its formation, it could be consistent with all known observations.
But most importantly, researchers have found that a dark Big Bang creates a distinctive signature in gravitational waves, which are ripples in space-time that are still moving around the universe until now. to this day. That means the theory could one day be tested.