Jan04
First clues to what came before the Big Bang
SYDNEY: The Big Bang is thought to have obliterated all trace of what came before. But astrophysicists now believe that interpreting an imprint from the earliest stages of the universe may provide some clues.
“It’s no longer completely crazy to ask what happened before the Big Bang,” said Marc Kamionkowski, of the California University of Technology in the USA.
Kamionkowski led a team who have proposed a mathematical model explaining an anomaly in what is supposed to be a universe of uniformly distributed radiation and matter. The study is detailed in the journal Physical Review D.
Exponential expansion
The investigators looked at a phenomenon called inflation, first proposed in 1980, which posits that space expanded exponentially in the instant following the Big Bang.
“Inflation starts the universe with a blank slate,” explained graduate student and team member Adrienne Erickcek. The hiccup in inflation, however, is that the universe is not as uniform as the simplest form of the theory predicts it to be. Some parts of it are more variable than others.
Until recently, measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation (a form of electromagnetic radiation that permeated the universe 400,000 years after the Big Bang) were consistent with inflation; miniscule fluctuations in the CMB seemed to be the same everywhere. …
Source: Cosmos Online – click here for full article
