Scientists find traces of black holes from other universes in the night sky. This shows that there have been other universes.
New Scientist says that the idea is based on a thing called “conformal cyclic cosmology” (CCC). It means that our universe didn’t start with a single Big Bang. Instead, it goes through cycles of Big Bangs and shrinking.
Even though most of the universe would be destroyed from one cycle to the next, these scientists say that some electromagnetic radiation might make it through the process. Their research results have been posted on arXiv.
“What we think we’re seeing is the last piece of a black hole that disappeared aeons ago,” said Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford and co-creator of the CCC theory. He was a co-author on the study and helped come up with the theory.
The evidence is given in the form of “Hawking points,” which are named after the late Stephen Hawking. He thought that black holes would give off Hawking radiation, which Penrose and his colleagues say could travel from one universe to the next.
They think Hawking points could come from the cosmic microwave background, which is the radiation left over from the Big Bang. Hawking spots would show up on the CMB map as rings of light called B-modes.
Before, scientists thought that gravitational waves or interstellar dust caused these strange spots in the CMB. But Penrose and his colleagues think that their theory could give an exciting answer. In fact, the BICEP2 project, which is trying to map the CMB, may have already found a Hawking point.
“The existence of such anomalous points seems to be a problem for cosmic inflation, but it is an implication of conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC),” the team wrote in their paper.
“Even though this radiation comes out at a very low temperature, the conformal compression of the entire future of the black hole makes it very concentrated in CCC. This makes it come out at a single point at the crossover into our current aeon.”
Not everyone agrees with the idea of a universe that recycles. Most of our data suggest that the expansion of the universe is speeding up, and that the universe is not dense enough to collapse back into a single point and then expand again. This idea is called the Big Bounce.