The answer the question about the time before the Big Bang a team of American astrophysicists has proposed a new way to check the inflationary model of the Universe, which consists in searching for signals of standard clocks generated by any type of heavy particles in the primary universe.
The inflationary model of the universe, which speaks of the rapid expansion of space within a few seconds immediately after the Big Bang, helps to solve some important questions about the structure and evolution of the cosmos, but other theories that are very different from it can also explain these riddles, although in a different way.
The ultimate goal of our work is to get an answer to the question: what was the Universe before the Big Bang? In some non-inflationary theories, the Universe preceding the Big Bang, the so-called primary universe, was shrinking, and thus the Big Bang was part of the Big Bounce. To understand this question, it is necessary first of all to prove the falsity of the inflationary model, but its seemingly infinite adaptability to the data makes its proper testing practically impossible.
At present, the situation with inflation is such that it is a very flexible idea that cannot be refuted experimentally. Regardless of what data astronomers get from observations and what discrepancies they find, theoreticians always have some inflation models that can explain this.
Therefore, astrophysicists from Harvard University (USA) decided to go from the opposite and developed the idea of primary standard clocks applied to non-inflationary theories, which could potentially lead to an experimental refutation of inflation. It is based on the fundamental property of various models – the evolution of the size of the primary universe.
For example, during inflation, the universe is growing exponentially. In some alternative theories, it is shrinking. In some, the universe does this very slowly, while in others it does so quickly. The parameters that were previously proposed for measurement in favor of each of the theories are usually peculiar to several of them and do not allow one to make an unequivocal conclusion, since they have no direct relation to the change in the size of the primary universe. We wanted to understand which observable characteristics can be directly associated with this fundamental property.
-Xin Chen, lead author of the study
The signals generated by the primary standard clock should be the key. This chronometer can be created by any type of heavy elementary particles in the primary universe. Such particles are inherent in all competing theories, and their oscillations with a certain regular frequency in many respects resemble the motion of a pendulum.
The primary universe was not completely homogeneous and contained tiny irregularities in density, which eventually became the seeds of large-scale structures in the modern universe. This property, according to the researchers, is the main source of information that will help to find out what happened before the Big Bang, since the ticking of the standard clock generated signals imprinted in these clots, while different theories of the primary universe predict individual types of signals due to various evolutionary paths of space.
If we present all the information about what happened before the Big Bang, in the form of film frames, then the standard clock should tell us how to watch it. Without any information about them, we do not know whether the film should be played forward or backward, quickly or slowly, just as we cannot say whether the primary universe was expanding or shrinking, and how quickly it did. Standard watches put time stamps on each of these shots taken before the Big Bang and tell us how to play the movie.
-Xin Chen
Astrophysicists have calculated how these standard clock signals should look in non-inflationary theories, and suggested a method for finding them.
If we can find a set of signals that indicate the compression of the primary universe, it will destroy all inflationary theories. However, they will be very difficult to detect, so we may have to look into many remote corners of space. Relic radiation is one of these places, the distribution of galaxies in the universe is another. We have already started the search, and we have some interesting candidates, but we need more data.
-Xin Chen
Scientists note that future missions, such as the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope telescope, the Euclid space observatory and the recently approved SphereX project, will provide high-quality data that can be used to experimentally test the Universe’s inflation model.
What was before the Big Bang?
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