A strange, super-powerful particle that was not really a particle could have dominated the universe when it was just a second, releasing a flood of wrinkles that penetrated all of space-time.
Called oscillons, they would have been so energetic that they could trigger ‘ripples’ so-called gravitational waves – those vibrations in the tissue of space-time that are generated when monster black holes slam into each other. Future experiments to detect these gravitational waves in the early universe may give us insight into the most extreme conditions the universe has ever encountered.
Related: From big bang to the present: screenshots of our universe through time
Make it big
Physicists believe that the universe became much larger in a short time when the universe was very young. We call this dramatic event ‘inflation’, and it was perhaps the defining event of the baby cosmos. Sometimes within the first fraction of a second of the existence of the universe, something happened (we do not know exactly what) that drove the rate of expansion to supercritical levels and ballooned the universe at least 10 ^ 52 times ( or 1 followed by 52 zeros) greater than before.
After the inflation event, something else happened (again, we are not exactly sure what) to settle things and resume a calmer expansion rate (one that continues to this day).
Cosmologists is pretty sure that this super-fast ballooning happened in the early universe, because today the universe is remarkably uniform on a very large scale. A quick expansion could have done the trick – smoothing out all the wrinkles.
In addition, astronomers have observed indirect evidence for the inflationary event. Inflation did not just ‘make the universe go big’. It also spurred another event called warming up. Whatever caused inflation eventually died out, but as it faded from the cosmological scene, the inflation-causing mechanism released its remaining pent-up energy, transforming this mysterious trigger into a flood of particles that could eventually compose into protons. a neutron, atoms, molecules, stars, planets and you.
Related: We can finally know what happened moments before the big bang
At the same time, as everything in the universe expands during inflation, there were also small quantum fluctuations in space-time, which stretched in macroscopic differences – significant bumps and windings in the fabric of space-time; these quantum fluctuations meant that some places in the universe had more attraction than average. In turn, the places of stronger gravity collected pieces of material, and those pieces of material grew over billions of years and formed the seed for all the great structures we see in the cosmos today.
And if inflation were able to do that, it could yield even stranger things.
Shoot your
What sparked the inflation event was going on, physicists have different ideas, one of which includes a quantum phenomenon called scalar fields that span all of space and time. A scalar field is basically a flashy way of saying that this field has a value or strength at every point in the universe, but has no specific direction (to help you visualize it when you draw a temperature map see the local weather forecast, you ‘look at a scalar field again). In the modern universe, scalar fields are basically bit players. But the early universe was a very different place, and scale fields now scarce could have been in abundance at the time. Indeed, some theories about inflation suggest that it was a scalar field that did all the expansion work.
You can think of a scalar field as the surface of the ocean. It stretches to all sides and to the horizon, and there are various waves roaring over it. Just like in the ocean, waves in a scalar field can sometimes be calm and frequent, and sometimes erratic and violent.
According to a new article published in the preprint database in December 2020 arXiv, this is exactly what happened in the extremely early universe. Shortly after inflation occurred, just as warming began and the universe was flooded with particles, any random scalar fields could have been disturbed, like a hurricane opening up over the Atlantic Ocean.
This could cause ‘oscillones’, which are stable waves that can last a long time. Oscillons happen in all sorts of situations; a solitary wave, for example, is a kind of oscillation. If oscillons form within quantum scalar fields, they also generate their own kind of unique particles.
See what happens
These oscillons do not really participate directly in any particle interaction, but the oscillons themselves can still affect the universe. The oscillons would have come down in the young universe, and for a short time the energy in the oscillons could have been stronger than the energy in any other field or family of particles.
With all the procrastination and waving, interesting things are likely to happen. In the case of oscillators, the sloshing could cause gravitational waves, that is, vibrations in the tissue of space-time itself. As the oscillons swing back and forth across the cosmos, their extreme energy distorts space-time, causing the gravitational crimps.
Long after the oscillons have disappeared, the gravitational waves can remain and ripple through the cosmos to this day. Although we can not yet detect gravitational waves from the early universe, emerging detectors such as LISA (the laser interferometer space antennas) and BBO (the big bang observatory) could.
If this oscillation picture is correct, it is one possible mechanism for inflation to generate gravitational waves. If we then see the waves, we will see a glimpse of the universe as if it were under a second age.
Originally published on Live Science.