#news Radiation ripples show the Big Bang may not have been the first, and there could be more to come

• By Helen Davidson
• From: news.com.au
• November 30, 2010

These rings of radiation may be evidence of successive big bangs. Picture: Sir Roger Penrose and Vahe Gurzadyan Source: news.com.au

THE Big Bang might not have been the beginning of the universe, but just the start of a new chapter.

Scientists have found rings of radiation in the cosmos that may be older than the Big Bang, suggesting that event was just the latest in a series of rebirths, Wired reports.

The theory was proposed by Sir Roger Penrose, a theoretical physicist at Oxford University, and Vahe Gurzadyan of the Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia, in an article on arXiv.org.

The circles of radiation appear in concentric circles made up of below average temperature in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), which is the leftover glow of the Big Bang.

The CMB — which dates back to 300,000 years after the Big Bang — is a consistent temperature, indicating the density.

According to the mathematical research, pulses of energy created a uniform region of dark matter, seen as circles. These pulses were the result of gravitational waves from previous eons running into the current one.

The researchers posit that a single Big Bang would release huge gravitational energy bursts, not in uniform waves as the circles indicate.

Sir Roger interprets the circles as ripple-like evidence of collisions between multiple supermassive black holes that occurred during the Universe's previous life, or eon, suggesting that there were and will be many more.

"What would normally be regarded as a probable entire history of our universe, starting with its Big Bang... is taken to be but one aeon in a (perhaps unending) succession of such aeons (sic)," the scientists say.

Sir Roger says these circles cannot be explained by the current "inflation theory" which posits that the universe grew rapidly from the size of an atom in the first nanoseconds of the Big Bang.

Inflation would most likely iron out these patterns, or not create them in the first place.

Princeton University cosmologist David Spergel told Wired that "the existence of large-scale coherent features in the microwave background of this form would appear to contradict the inflationary model".

However he added that there was not enough detail to assess the reality of the circles yet.

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