
In the standard cosmological picture, the early Universe was a very exotic place. Perhaps the most important thing that happened in our world was the fact of inflationwhich very soon, right after the Big Bang, sent us The Universe in a period of extremely rapid expansion.
When this inflation ended, the exotic quantum fields that drove this event weakened, transforming into flood of particles and radiation that remain today.
The beginning of the Universe: was it what we thought?
When our Universe was less than 20 minutes old, the aforementioned particles began to merge into the first protons and neutrons during what we call Big Bang nuclear fusion. Big Bang Nucleosynthesis is a pillar of modern cosmology, and so is this the calculations behind it accurately predict the amount of hydrogen and helium in the world.
However, despite the success in obtaining a picture of the early Universe, it has not yet become possible to understand dark matter, which is the mysterious, invisible form of matter that makes up the vast majority of mass in the universe. The default assumption in his models big explosion is this any process that created particles and radiation also created dark matter. And after that, dark matter just wandered around, oblivious to everyone else.
Dark energy could lead to a second (and third and fourth) Big Bang, new research suggests https://t.co/PKSyROwXPI pic.twitter.com/NIQ1ppFvEy
— SPACE.com (@SPACEdotcom) March 7, 2023
However, a group of researchers has proposed a new theory. These scientists argue that Inflation and the Big Bang nuclear fusion epochs were not unique.
Dark matter may have evolved along an entirely separate trajectory. According to this scenario, when inflation ended, it flooded the Universe with particles and radiation, but not dark matter. In this way, there was still some quantum field that did not decay. As the universe expanded and cooled, this extra quantum field eventually mutated, causing dark matter to form.
Until now, it was believed that dark matter was created after the Big Bang, however, a group of scientists decided to create a new theory that it was created shortly after the event.
This approach opens up ways to explore a rich variety of theoretical models for dark matteras now that it is known to have had a distinct evolutionary path, it is easier to follow the calculations to see how it compares to observations.
For example, the team was able to determine which if an event was called dark big bangthis should happen when our Universe is less than a month old. However, we still don’t know if this happened or not, so more studies will be done to try to understand it better.