Big Bang remains the most reliable model to explain the origin of the universe, but science is “Gaga” when it tries to describe the first moments of the famous cosmic explosion. This may be about to change.
The very concept of time, as we understand it, did not exist at this initial moment: there is not one before the big bang that can be identified with our notion of time. Known equations fail to make sense when we retreated to the fraction of the second one started.
Now a group of investigators believes he has found a way to overcome these limitations, paving the way to understand what may have happened before the Big Bang.
The investigation in the magazine Living Reviews in Relativity is based on complex computational simulations to numerically resolve Einstein’s overall relativity equations, the.
A numerical relativity It was created in the 1960s and 1970s to study the fusion of black holes and the emission of gravitational waves. Although Einstein’s theory provided for its existence, only through numerical calculations in supercomputer was it possible to predict the exact way these waves would take.
The success of the detection of the first gravitational waves almost ten years ago showed that numerical relativity can overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles. It is this same approach that researchers now want to apply to the largest puzzle of modern cosmology: the Big Bang itself and the phase of cosmic inflationwhen the newborn universe expanded at unimaginable speed.
Inflation is considered essential to explain why the cosmos seems so homogeneous in all directions. But its origin is a mystery.
Inflation is not a theory, but a model derived from something more fundamental. Nursely resolving the equations associated with this process may reveal clues about fields, interactions or properties that go beyond the observable universe. Such results could provide evidence to hypotheses such as the cyclic universe – in which each big bang would be followed by a collapse and a new “rebirth” – or even multiversewhere our cosmos would be just one of many.
Despite having potential, the challenge faced by the technique is huge. Mathematical complexity is such that only with recent advances of computing has become possible to face the problem with seriousness.
