Are we all just part of an endless cosmic cycle
-
Science’s best guess at how the universe came into being includes the Big Bang followed by a moment of rapid inflationary expansion.
-
However, this theory left a few mysteries and quirks in its wake, including the existence of dark matter and conundrums like “the flatness problem.”
-
A fringe theory known as non-singular matter bouncing cosmology claims to answer these issues by suggesting that the universe “bounces” between a hot big bang era and the kind of universe we see today.
Answering the question of how everything began was always going to be a difficult one, but humans have made incredible progress—especially considering that, in the cosmological blink of an eye, we’ve gone from writing on cave walls to carrying handheld computers around in our pockets.
Although an intriguing idea, the Big Bang + Inflation model of the universe is still the modern cave man’s best bet at understanding what shaped our universe. But the researchers say it should be possible to figure out if this non-singular matter bouncing cosmology holds any merit as “enhanced curvature perturbations, collapsing to primordial black holes, can induce as well a stochastic gravitational-wave background.”
The Big Bounce theory isn’t particularly new, but it’s fascinating to see more recent contributions and work on it. I am happy it still is under active investigation and hasn’t been disproven, as I find the idea of an endless heartbeat of the universe much more beautiful and less depressing than a Big Bang followed by heat death of the universe.
Same. Always feels better to be part of something larger
How do these theories deal with the observation that the universe rate of expansion appears to be increasing? Wouldn’t a bounce imply that the expansion rate should decrease?
The expansion rate should decrease and eventually reverse at some point. I don’t think anyone has yet defined when or why, or the theory would be considered complete. But us currently being in the phase of expansion doesn’t automatically invalidate the theory I don’t think. Then again, I’m not an astrophysicist.