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Some Black Holes May Pre-Date The Big Bang, Say Cosmologists
www.technologyreview.com ^ | 05/03/2011 | Staff

Posted on 05/03/2011 12:23:32 PM PDT by Red Badger

If the Universe expands and contracts in cycles of Big Bangs and Crunches, some black holes may survive from one era to the next, according to a new analysis

Black holes are regions of space in which gravity is so strong that nothing can escape, not even light. Conventionally, black holes form during a gravitational collapse, after a large supernova for example.

But there is another class of objects called primordial black holes that cosmologists think must have formed in a different way. These are essentially leftovers from the hugely dense ball of stuff from which the universe expanded, some parts of which must have been dense enough to form black holes.

These primordial black holes would then have been widely dispersed as the universe expanded.

Primordial black holes are very different beasts to the ones that form when stars die, in particular because they ought to be much smaller.

Although nobody has yet seen a primordial black hole, our knowledge of them comes from thinking about the processes that must have occurred shortly after the Big Bang.

In recent years, however, cosmologists have begun to think seriously about processes that occurred before the Big Bang. One idea, is that the Universe may eventually collapse leading to an endless cycle of Big Bangs and Crunches.

Today, Bernard Carr at Queen Mary University of London, UK, and Alan Coley at Dalhousie University in Canada, ask what might happen in such a universe in the moments before a crunch.

By some accounts, a Big Crunch generates a singularity that ought to cause everything in the Universe to merge. But Carr and Coley say that in some circumstances, black holes of a certain mass could avoid this fate and survive the crunch as separate entities. The masses for which this is possible range from a few hundred million kilograms to about the mass of our Sun.

That leads to a problem, however. Coley and Carr say that since the mass of primordial and pre-crunch black holes is similar, they will be very difficult to tell apart.

Nobody has yet seen a primordial black hole, although efforts are underway to search for the telltale signatures they ought to produce.

Small black holes ought to evaporate away in relatively short period of time, finally disappearing in a violent explosion of gamma rays. The hope is that observatories such as the Fermi Gamma Ray Space Telescope will see such events. Indeed, some cosmologists say this thinking might explain the gamma ray bursts that we already see from time to time.

What all this means, of course, is that there may be objects in our Universe that predate the Big Bang. And if we can somehow find a way to distinguish them from primordial black holes, we may yet be able to observe these most ancient of objects.

Ref: arxiv.org/abs/1104.3796 : Persistence Of Black Holes Through A Cosmological Bounce


TOPICS: Culture/Society; Miscellaneous; News/Current Events; Philosophy
KEYWORDS: astronomy; bigbang; blackholes; cosmology
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Don't ask me what this is. I have no freaking idea............

1 posted on 05/03/2011 12:23:35 PM PDT by Red Badger
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To: Red Badger
Although nobody has yet seen a primordial black hole, our knowledge of them comes from thinking about the processes that must have occurred shortly after the Big Bang.

Since when did faith in something that is unobservable become a valid tool of science?

2 posted on 05/03/2011 12:29:06 PM PDT by pnh102 (Regarding liberalism, always attribute to malice what you think can be explained by stupidity. - Me)
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To: Red Badger
...thinking about the processes that must have occurred shortly after the Big Bang.

Now we may be able to think about the processes that must have occurred before the Big Bang.

Something to do.

3 posted on 05/03/2011 12:31:56 PM PDT by Rudder (The Main Stream Media is Our Enemy---get used to it.)
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To: Red Badger

That graph looks like science of some sort...


4 posted on 05/03/2011 12:32:00 PM PDT by El Sordo (The bigger the government, the smaller the citizen.)
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To: pnh102

“Since when did faith in something that is unobservable become a valid tool of science?”

Amen to that!


5 posted on 05/03/2011 12:32:17 PM PDT by Bruinator (God is Great.... God is Good....Evil is Real.)
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To: Red Badger

How do you go about asking a black hole how old it is?


6 posted on 05/03/2011 12:33:47 PM PDT by HiTech RedNeck (Hawk)
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To: pnh102

Nobody said anything about faith.


7 posted on 05/03/2011 12:35:05 PM PDT by mlo
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To: Red Badger

I think the universe was created by two baby squirrels rubbing their tails together. No one has ever seen it but in theory it might have happened that way.


8 posted on 05/03/2011 12:35:19 PM PDT by JusPasenThru (HEY UNION MEMBER: INVEST IN YOUR OWN DAMN INFRASTRUCTURE FOR A CHANGE!)
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To: mlo

???????????

Who do you think made the laws the Universe operates by?


9 posted on 05/03/2011 12:37:49 PM PDT by ZULU (Lindsey Graham is a nanometrical pustule of pusillanimous putrescent excrement)
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To: Red Badger
This is going to mess up their "Big Bang Theory"!

Only if they would believe that "God said..." and their problems would be solved on the origins of the universe!
10 posted on 05/03/2011 12:39:06 PM PDT by ForAmerica (Conservative Christian Black Man!)
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To: Red Badger

So then, they’re expired?


11 posted on 05/03/2011 12:39:35 PM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: Red Badger
And if we can somehow find a way to distinguish them from primordial black holes, we may yet be able to observe these most ancient of objects.

I thought LSD went out of style years ago. Obviously not.

"Hey man, what if our whole universe is just a few atoms on the back of a turtle in another universe?"

12 posted on 05/03/2011 12:40:50 PM PDT by FatherofFive (Islam is evil and must be eradicated)
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To: El Sordo

I lol’ed.


13 posted on 05/03/2011 12:41:11 PM PDT by randomhero97 ("First you want to kill me, now you want to kiss me. Blow!" - Ash)
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To: pnh102

Just don’t call it God.


14 posted on 05/03/2011 12:41:54 PM PDT by massgopguy (I owe everything to George Bailey)
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To: Red Badger

42?


15 posted on 05/03/2011 12:41:54 PM PDT by King Moonracer (Bad lighting and cheap fabric, that's how you sell clothing.....)
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To: mlo
Nobody said anything about faith.

Believing that something exists without any objective proof requires faith.

Why should I believe that "primordial black holes" even exist if none have been observed? Even if all the "evidence" points to such things existing, we could say that there's a ton of evidence that Bigfoot exists as well, even though no one has seen Bigfoot.

This piece honestly reads like bad fiction. Perhaps these scientists should wait until they have observed something before they speculate as to whether or not it exists.

16 posted on 05/03/2011 12:42:03 PM PDT by pnh102 (Regarding liberalism, always attribute to malice what you think can be explained by stupidity. - Me)
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To: ForAmerica

How do you know that the Big Bang isn’t the “God Said” moment?


17 posted on 05/03/2011 12:43:37 PM PDT by achilles2000 ("I'll agree to save the whales as long as we can deport the liberals")
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To: Red Badger

From the left side of the graph, it appears there were no Birth Certificates for a Barak Hussein somebody or other. But as you move to the right, there was apparently PCB contamination at a High school.


18 posted on 05/03/2011 12:44:31 PM PDT by Larry Lucido
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To: HiTech RedNeck

From a great distance. Same as with a woman.


19 posted on 05/03/2011 12:44:41 PM PDT by Hunton Peck (See my FR homepage for a list of businesses that support WI Gov. Scott Walker)
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To: pnh102

This is a classic case of intellectual masturbation. There are no facts or phenomenon to support the theory.


20 posted on 05/03/2011 12:45:18 PM PDT by Citizen Tom Paine (An old sailor sends)
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