Cosmic Radiation May Indicate Numerous Universes Before Big Bang

Posted by Heartmind _Featured_, Space Thursday, December 2nd, 2010

Most experts say that our universe was created in a single Big Bang that dates back 13.7 billion years ago. However, these commonly held beliefs are being challenged by new analysis of the microwave radiation left behind by the Big Bang. Two theoretical physicists are now suggesting that the universe originally started eons before the Big Bang, and that the Big Bang is only the most recent starting point of our universe’s many birth and death cycles.

This new theory has been put forth by theoretical physicist Roger Penrose, of the University of Oxford in England, and Vahe Gurzadyan, of the Yerevan Physics Institute and Yerevan State University in Armenia. According to them, the circular patterns that can be seen in the microwave radiation background of the universe indicate multiple cycles of cosmic beginnings and endings.

The circular radiation features are areas where cosmologists find temperature variations in the microwave background, which are otherwise uniform. Penrose claims the circles allow scientists to look back into the what he calls the universe’s previous “aeon”.

These controversial new conclusions go against the standard cosmological theory called “inflation”, which explains that the newly born universe expanded from something about the size of an atom, to the size of a grapefruit within the first fraction of a second after its birth. Penrose and Gurzadyan assert that inflation would not cause the circular radiation patterns observed in the microwave background, and would have actually erased them.

Penrose and Gurzadyan’s research was posted as an article in the science archive arXiv.org on November 17th.

Full article: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/recycled-universe/

Image: arXiv.org/V.G. Gurzadyan and R. Penrose