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Look into the skies long enough, and the Universe begins to resemble a city at night. Galaxies take on the characteristics of streetlamps cluttering up neighborhoods of dark matter, linked by gas highways that run along the shores of intergalactic nothingness.
This map of the Universe was predetermined, presented in the smallest thrill of quantum physics moments after the Big Bang launched into an expansion of space and time 13.8 billion years ago.
Yet the exact nature of these fluctuations and how they set in motion the physics that would see atoms cluster together in the massive cosmic structures we see today are still far from clear.
A new mathematical analysis of the moments after a period called the inflationary epoch reveals that some sort of structure could have existed even in the bubbling quantum oven that filled the infant universe, and it could help us better understand its arrangement today. .
Astrophysicists at the University of Göttingen in Germany and the University of Auckland in New Zealand used a mixture of particle motion simulations and some sort of gravitational / quantum modeling to predict how structures might form in the condensation of particles after inflation.
The scale of this type of modeling is a bit breathtaking. We are talking about masses of up to 20 kilograms squeezed into a space of just 10-20 meters in diameter, at a time when the Universe was only 10-24 seconds old.
“The physical space represented by our simulation would fit into a single proton a million times,” says astrophysicist Jens Niemeyer of the University of Göttingen.
“This is probably the largest simulation of the smallest area of the Universe that has been done so far.”
Most of what we know about this early stage of the Universe’s existence is based on this kind of mathematical research. The oldest light we can still see flickering across the Universe is Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB), and the whole show had been on the road for around 300,000 years already.
But in this faint echo of ancient radiations, there are clues as to what was going on.
The light from the CMB was emitted as basic particles combined into atoms from the hot, energy dense soup, during the time of recombination.
A map of this background radiation across the sky shows that our Universe already had some sort of structure a few hundred thousand years ago. There were slightly cooler chunks and slightly warmer chunks that could push matter into areas that would eventually see stars ignite, spiral galaxies, and masses come together in the cosmic city we see today. hui.
This poses a question.
The space constituting our Universe is expanding, which means that the Universe must once have been much smaller. So it stands to reason that everything we see around us now was once crammed into a volume too confined for such hot and cold spots to emerge.
Like a cup of coffee in an oven, there was no way for any room to cool down before it warmed up again.
The inflationary period has been proposed to solve this problem. Within trillionths of a second of the Big Bang, our Universe has jumped an insane amount, essentially freezing all quantum-scale variations in place.
To say it happened in the blink of an eye still wouldn’t do it justice. It would have started around 1036 seconds after the Big Bang, and ended with 1032 seconds. But it was long enough for the space to assume proportions that prevented small variations in temperature from smoothing out again.
The researchers’ calculations focus on this brief moment after inflation, demonstrating how elementary particles freezing from the foam of quantum ripples at that point could have generated brief halos of matter dense enough to wrinkle space-time. himself.
“The formation of such structures, as well as their movements and interactions, must have generated a background noise of gravitational waves”, explains astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen Benedikt Eggemeier, first author of the study.
“With the help of our simulations, we can calculate the strength of this gravitational wave signal, which may be measurable in the future.”
In some cases, the intense masses of these objects could have drawn matter into primordial black holes, objects believed to contribute to the mysterious pull of dark matter.
The fact that the behavior of these structures mimics the large-scale agglutination of our Universe today does not necessarily mean that it is directly responsible for the current distribution of stars, gases, and galaxies.
But the intricate physics unfolding among these freshly baked particles could still be visible in the sky, among this rolling landscape of twinkling lights and dark voids that we call the Universe.
This research was published in Physical examination D.
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