A New Theory Suggest that the Birth of the Universe May Have Been from a 4-D Black Hole
Credit: NASA
A new journal published by astronomers at the University of Waterloo suggest that the birth of the universe didn’t happen from the Big Bang but a 4 dimensional black hole. If your brain hurts then just bear with me because this article is going to get rough. Let’s say that of course nobody actually knows how the universe was born without understanding what happened in the planck era, which deserves another write up but for now you can read this if you are interested.
Before we move on it is my duty to explain that this paper is only raising questions and not exactly answering them. Furthermore, these ideas are not entirely new to the scientific community and have been kicking around for about 20 years.
So before we had the stars, planets and galaxies we had a singularity that was incredibly small, dense and an unimaginable amount of energy. How did the universe expand from this point of singularity? Well the leading theory has been the Big Bang theory where it expanded at incredible rates from the point of singularity caused by some rupture. However, the astronomers at the University of Waterloo pose something different. The Big Bang has limitations in the theory and those limitations are with the point of singularity. What happened before the point of singularity? Nobody knows. Many cosmologists suggest that the expansion of the universe during the Big Bang was so intense that it was expanding faster than the speed of light. However Ashford says,”The Big Bang was so chaotic, it’s not clear there would have been even a small homogenous patch for inflation to start working on.”
What happens after a supernova. Credit: NASA
This is what the theoretical physicists proposed (and this is where it gets ROUGH):
1) The model they constructed is a three dimensional universe floating as a membrane in a “bulk universe” that has four dimensions.
2) So if this four dimensional universe has four dimensional stars then we can think about the typical life cycle of a star. A massive star is born then it sheds its layers until the last element where it collapses onto itself and goes supernova (for the sake of the example).
3) The 4-D black hole would have an event horizon just like a 3-D one would. The event horizon is a region around the black hole that if anything travels into it there is no coming back.
4) In a 3-D universe a black hole would be observed as a 2-D surface so in a 4-D universe the black hole would be observed as a 3-D object called hypersphere.
5) When the 4-D star blows apart the left over material would create a 3-D brane around the 3-D black hole or event horizon. Then from there it expands.
In short the model explains where the singularity could have come from and how it expanded from there. This theory definitely hurts your brain once you start picturing 4 dimensions but it does make you wonder how the universe really began. With the Planck telescope giving us the baby pictures of the universe it’s one step closer to understanding how it came about.
If you are brave you can read the published paper here.
A more friendlier version can be found here.