Scientists believe that tremendous energy prevailed in the early universe with powerful events fueled by the expansion of the cosmos and the fragmentation of essential forces. Recent research proposes that it results in the vast energies produced by massive bubbles.
The study, titled "Bubbletrons" available in the preprint server arXiv, suggests that these massive bubbles called "bubbletrons" possibly emerged and collided, generating energies surpassing Earth's most advanced particle accelerators. These energies might have inundated the universe with dark matter particles, microscopic black holes, and other phenomena.
Meet the Bubbletrons: Massive Bubbles With Extreme Energies That Likely Powered the Early Universe
What Are Bubbletrons?
The four fundamental forces of nature can merge at high energies, demonstrated in particle colliders as electromagnetism and weak nuclear force unite into an "electroweak" force, suggesting a potential unification of all forces at higher energies following the Big Bang's phase transitions.
If the transitions were violent, gigantic bubbles could have filled the universe temporarily, inside which the forces were separated from each other, while outside the bubbles, the unified forces remained. These bubbles carried immense energy, surpassing any present-day natural or human-made processes.
The expanding edges of the bubbles could accelerate nearby particles to high speeds, creating showers of released energy and new particles. Eventually, the bubbles would merge, contributing to particle creation.
The researchers found that these "bubbletrons" could have generated sufficient energies to trigger the formation of hypothetical dark matter particles, potentially explaining the observed amount of dark matter in the universe. Additionally, they might have produced more exotic objects like microscopic black holes that rapidly evaporated, adding their energy to the mix.
The expansion and collision of bubbletrons in the early universe would have produced numerous gravitational waves that still reverberate billions of years later, contributing to the universe's background hum of gravitational waves.
Researchers believe some of these waves may originate from the formation and disappearance of bubbletrons, and further investigation with advanced gravitational wave detectors and pulsar timing arrays could offer direct evidence of their significant but fleeting existence.
READ ALSO: Big Bang Theory: Where Its Name Came From & Why Its More Accurate Than the Steady State Theory
What Happened During the Big Bang?
As per Space.com, the Big Bang Theory is the prevailing hypothesis for the origin of the universe, suggesting that it began from an incredibly hot and dense single point that rapidly expanded and stretched over 13.7 billion years to form the currently expanding cosmos.
At the beginning, the universe was a small, incredibly dense and hot singularity. Then, in a sudden and brief period known as cosmic inflation, the universe rapidly expanded faster than the speed of light. After cosmic inflation ended, the universe underwent a "reheating" phase, populating it with matter and radiation, including fundamental particles like neutrons, electrons, and protons.
The early universe was so hot that it could not hold visible light, but about 380,000 years after the Big Bang, when free electrons combined with nuclei, light was finally able to shine through, creating the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
The CMB was accidentally discovered in 1965 by Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, who stumbled upon higher-than-expected temperatures while building a radio receiver, and their observations were later recognized as evidence of the CMB by a Princeton University team led by Robert Dicke.
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