14 DAY TRIAL // According to a study published in April 2011, it could be that primordial black holes, the first structures of their type in the Universe, were not produced after the Big Bang but, rather, before it. If proven, this idea could turn modern cosmology on its head.
Simply put, there is no way for something to have been produced before the Big Bang, since this is the time when the entire Cosmos, and everything in it, came into being. For many years, even proposing that something came before 13.75 billion years ago was scientific blasphemy.
However, in more recent times, cosmologists have started asking numerous questions that were previously not taken into account. One of them deals with whether or not it's possible for a primordial black hole to survive a Big Bang – Big Crunch cycle.
The Big Crunch is one of the proposed fates of the Universe. In essence, it states that the current accelerated expansion the Cosmos is experiencing will eventually stop, and then reverse. When this happens, everything will collapse back into a single point.
Some theoretical astrophysicists propose that this is a repeating cycle, where Big Bang and Big Crunch events alternate over trillions of years. The question then arises, can primordial black holes (PBH) survive such transitions?
Dalhousie University cosmologist Alan Coley and colleague Bernard Carr, who is based at the Queen University London, believe that this is possible. However, the structures need to have a relatively low mass, ranging from a few hundred million kilograms to about the mass of our Sun.
Most of this hypothesis is based on the fact that the Universe is occasionally permeated by bursts of gamma rays (GRB), whose origins are unknown. Some cosmologists believe that these events are caused by primordial black holes running out of energy, and dying off, Daily Galaxy reports.
Even if PBH can survive these universal rebirths, the team admits, there is no way of testing that at this point. In other words, there is no method we can apply to their study in order to determine if they are older than the estimated age of the (current) Universe.
Ideas such as this one have great potential to inform new studies. Even if they turn out to be nothing but speculation, the researches they inspire may yield information that could be of value later on.