The Big Bang Theory is widely accepted as the explanation for the origin of the universe, but it doesn’t tell us what came before it. The idea of a universe before the Big Bang may seem impossible, but recent scientific discoveries suggest otherwise. In this article, we’ll explore the strongest evidence for a universe before the Big Bang.
The Big Bang Theory is the most widely accepted explanation for the origin of the universe. According to this theory, the universe began as a singularity, a point of infinite density and temperature. But what caused the Big Bang? And what came before it? These questions have puzzled scientists and philosophers for centuries.
Astronomers have discovered two new black holes that are the closest ones to Earth known, and also represent something that astronomers have never seen before.
The black holes, designated Gaia BH1 and Gaia BH2, were discovered in data collected by the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Gaia spacecraft.
New calculations suggest that the event horizons will eventually “decohere” quantum possibilities—even those that are far away.
A central pillar of cosmology — the universe is the same everywhere and in all directions — is surviving a storm of possible evidence against it.
The “spooky action at a distance” that once unnerved Einstein may be on its way to being as pedestrian as the gyroscopes that currently measure acceleration in smartphones.
Quantum entanglement significantly improves the precision of sensors that can be used to navigate without GPS, according to a new study in Nature Photonics.
“By exploiting entanglement, we improve both measurement sensitivity and how quickly we can make the measurement,” said Zheshen Zhang, associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of Michigan and co-corresponding author of the study. The experiments were done at the University of Arizona, where Zhang was working at the time.
The mapping of matter in the cosmos helps to confirm Einstein’s theory of general relativity and reveals more about mysterious dark matter.
In 2017, the European Southern Observatory (ESO) obtained the first ever real photo of a black hole. Six years later, artificial intelligence was able to improve the image.
Here’s What We Know
American scientists have decided to improve the photo of a black hole. The original image shows something resembling a “fuzzy donut”. Experts have applied the PRIMO algorithm, based on machine learning, to improve the image.
Where did all the antimatter go? After the Big Bang, matter and antimatter should have been created in equal amounts. Why we live in a universe of matter, with very little antimatter, remains a mystery. The excess of matter could be explained by the violation of charge-parity (CP) symmetry, which essentially means that certain processes that involve particles behave differently to those that involve their antiparticles.
However, the CP-violating processes that have been observed so far are insufficient to explain the matter–antimatter asymmetry in the universe. New sources of CP violation must be out there—and might be hiding in interactions involving the Higgs boson. In the Standard Model of particle physics, Higgs-boson interactions with other particles conserve CP symmetry. If researchers find signs of CP violation in these interactions, they could be a clue to one of the universe’s oldest mysteries.
In a new analysis of its full dataset from Run 2 of the LHC, the ATLAS collaboration tested the Higgs-boson interactions with the carriers of the weak force, the W and Z bosons, looking for signs of CP violation. The collaboration studied Higgs-boson decays into two Z bosons, each of which transforms into a pair of leptons (an electron and a positron or a muon and an antimuon), thus resulting in four charged leptons. The researchers also studied interactions in which two W or Z bosons combine to produce a Higgs boson. In this case, one quark and one antiquark are produced together with the Higgs boson, creating ‘jets’ of particles in the ATLAS detector.