Look far enough into the sky, and the Universe begins to look like a city at night. Galaxies take on the characteristics of street lamps that crowded dark neighborhoods, connected to gas highways that run along the shores of intergalactic nothingness.
This map of the Universe was pre-ordered, placed in the smallest shivers of quantum physics, moments after the Big Bang launched into an expansion of space and time about 13.8 billion years ago.
However, exactly what these fluctuations were and how they set in motion the physics that would see atoms gather in the massive cosmic structures we see today is still far from clear.
A new mathematical analysis of the moments after a period called the inflationary era reveals that there was a kind of structure even in the boiling quantum furnace that filled the Children’s Universe and could help us better understand its appearance today.
Astrophysicists at the University of Göttingen in Germany and the University of Auckland in New Zealand have used a mixture of particle motion simulations and a kind of gravitational / quantum modeling to predict how structures might form in the condensation of particles after their appearance. inflation.
The scale of this type of modeling is a little staggering. We are talking about masses up to 20 kilograms gathered in a space of just 10-20 meters in diameter, at a time when the Universe was only 10 years old-24 seconds old.
“The physical space represented by our simulation would fit into a single proton a million times,” says astrophysicist Jens Niemeyer of the University of Göttingen.
“It is probably the largest simulation of the smallest area of the universe that has ever been performed.”
Most of what we know about this early stage of the Universe’s existence is based solely on this type of mathematical invasion. The oldest light we can still see flickering through the Universe is the Cosmic Background Radiation (CMB), and the entire show had already been on its way for about 300,000 years.
But in that faint echo of ancient radiation there are some clues as to what was happening.
CMB light was emitted as basic particles combined into atoms in the hot and energy-dense soup, in what is known as the age of recombination.
A map of this background radiation in the sky shows our Universe which already had a kind of structure of several hundred thousand years. There were slightly cooler bits and slightly warmer bits that could push matter into areas that could eventually see the stars ignite, spiral galaxies and masses gather in the cosmic city we see today.
This raises a question.
The space that makes up our Universe is expanding, which means that once the Universe must have been much smaller. So it is obvious that everything we see around us was once crammed into a volume too limited for such hot and cold spots to appear.
Like a cup of coffee in an oven, there was no way to cool any part before reheating.
The inflationary period has been proposed as a way to solve this problem. A few trillionths of a second of the Big Bang, our Universe jumped in size with an insane amount, essentially freezing any variation on a quantum scale.
To say that this happened in an instant would not do him justice. It would have started around 10 o’clock36 seconds after the Big Bang and ended with 1032 seconds. But it was long enough for the space to settle in proportions that prevented small variations in temperature from smoothing again.
The researchers’ calculations focus on this brief moment after swelling, demonstrating how elementary particles that froze from the foam of quantum waves at that time could have generated short halos of matter dense enough to wrinkle space-time itself.
“The formation of such structures, as well as their movements and interactions, must have generated a background noise of gravitational waves,” says Benedikt Eggemeier, an astrophysicist at the University of Göttingen, the study’s lead author.
“With our simulations, we can calculate the strength of this gravitational wave signal, which could be measurable in the future.”
In some cases, the intense masses of such objects could have drawn matter into primordial black holes, objects thought to contribute to the mysterious drawing of dark matter.
The fact that the behavior of these structures mimics the large-scale agglomeration of our universe today does not necessarily mean that it is directly responsible for today’s distribution of stars, gases, and galaxies.
But the complex physics that unfolds among those freshly baked particles could still be seen in the sky, among that rolling landscape of twinkling lights and dark voids that we call the Universe.
This research was published in Physical review D.