The hot Big Bang is often touted as the beginning of the Universe. But there's one piece of evidence we can't ignore that shows otherwise.

…Earlier this century, some very strong evidence arrived showing that there was a Universe before the Big Bang, demonstrating that the Big Bang wasn’t truly the start of it all…

…The differences between a Universe that began with a hot Big Bang and a Universe that had an inflationary phase that precedes and sets up the hot Big Bang are subtle, but tremendously important…

…in a Universe that underwent a period of inflation prior to the start of the hot Big Bang, we’d expect there to be density fluctuations on all scales, including on scales larger than the speed of light, which could have allowed a signal to travel since the start of the hot Big Bang…

Although later fluctuations superimpose themselves atop the older, earlier, larger-scale fluctuations, inflation allows us to start the Universe off with ultra-large-scale fluctuations that shouldn’t exist in the Universe if it began with a Big Bang singularity without inflation.

…At any moment in the Universe’s history, there’s a limit to how far a signal that’s been traveling at the speed of light since the start of the hot Big Bang could’ve traveled, and that scale sets what’s known as the cosmic horizon…scales that are greater than the horizon, known as super-horizon scales, are beyond the limit of what could’ve been caused by physical signals generated at or since the start of the hot Big Bang.

…When we look at the final (2018-era) Planck TE cross-correlation data, below, the results are breathtaking…As you can clearly see, there can be no doubt that there truly are super-horizon fluctuations within the Universe, as the significance of this signal is overwhelming. The fact that we see super-horizon fluctuations, and that we see them not merely from reionization but as they are predicted to exist from inflation, is a slam dunk: the non-inflationary, singular Big Bang model does not match up with the Universe we observe.

    • RunawayFixer@lemmy.world
      12·
      13 days ago

      The old theory was that all matter was concentrated into a single singularity, and then the big bang happened.

      These newer measurements show that there is stuff outside of the area affected by the expanding big bang, indicating that there was already stuff floating around before the big bang happened, and that the big bang happened more gradual.

      To make a stupid analogy: the old theory is a cracker exploding in vacuum, while the newer theory says it’s more likely that the cracker exploded when someone was holding it in their fist, with the fist surrounded by a room filled with air. And now our powers of observation have become so good, that we can observe the air where it hasn’t been disturbed yet by the expanding explosion.

    • primrosepathspeedrun@anarchist.nexusEnglish
      111·
      12 days ago

      Theres stuff farther out than it should be possible for stuff to have gone in the amount of time since the big bang.
      So there was something before that. Or FTL is possible– it’s not.

      Edit: so everything i said is at most locally true/true for us.

      • gasgiant@lemmy.ml
        6·
        13 days ago

        Except that this says there are things that exist and have been measured on super scales which exceed the speed of light.

        Unless I’m not understanding it correctly there is something faster than light it is just beyond the boundary of the universe so we could never achieve it as we can’t exceed the speed of light within the universe to get to it.

          • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
            5·
            12 days ago

            Not so much that things can go faster than c, but that on a large enough scale, the universe can expand faster than c. What this means is, beyond a certain distance, the only way it’s possible to travel to or even observe some points is if we have FTL capability. This is effectively the edge of the universe, which is a local phenomenon - someone at our edge of the universe could very well see farther away than we can, but they also wouldn’t be able to see past us in the other direction (assuming some models are correct).

    • brian@lemmy.ca
      93·
      13 days ago

      Light moves fast, some shit moving faster than it cause stretchy-spacey-something, determined to be from before the big bang to make it work, and we can see the results I guess

      I dunno tho, I’m just making it up and hoping I’m close

    • justOnePersistentKbinPlease@fedia.io
      3·
      13 days ago

      Only going to touch on the article since I am not a physicist and yet: I suspect the article is bunk, because it seems to be trying to separate the big bang and inflation theory into competing theories.

      General layman understanding of things in a nutshell. this may be completely wrong, and is likely full of “Lies-To-Children”

      1. Everything compressed into singularity.
      2. Big bang, everything is super hot plasma.
      3. Faster than light expansion of the universe. Too hot to make anything out with the tools we have.
      4. Things cool and the inflation stops being completely insane, the base fluctuations remaining from the big bang result in inequal distribution of matter, the first supermassive stars and their accretion discs form.
      5. Those stars die and form into the supermassive black holes that form the seeds of all galaxies.
      6. Because of whatever Dark Energy is, something related to a lack matter in space, the space between clusters of galaxies and clusters of clusters of galaxies, the rate of inflation of universe starts increasing and things start moving apart.