Amid all the options, it’s clear why the cosmological bounce is attracting a lot of interest. In fact, at least one team of scientists even believes our 13.7-billion-year-old universe is at the end of the most recent expansion phase, and could start contracting again in a hundred million years or so on its way to a fresh bounce in a few billion, or tens of billions, of years.Īlternative theories for ways the universe might end include the universe slowing down and freezing, collapsing in on itself or spinning apart into countless, fragmentary pocket universes. A cosmological bounce is one of several leading theories among cosmologists who study the origin and fate of the universe. To be clear, the underlying idea that the universe repeatedly expands and contracts is not new. Leandros Perivolaropoulos, University of Ioannina Pérez and Romero’s methods “have a significant potential for improvement, to put it mildly,” Perivolaropoulos added. We have no idea how a black hole would behave when the rules no longer apply. That’s what we mean by a singularity: an exception to the laws of physics. In other words, at the moment the universe collapses to its smallest size right before bouncing back, gravity would stop functioning normally. “Thus any conclusion based on it can not be taken seriously.” “General relativity itself breaks down at both the black hole singularity and the cosmological bounce singularity,” Perivolaropoulos said.
We might be trying to fathom the unfathomable. It’s possible that, at the moment a universe bounces from contraction to expansion, all the rules that guide our understanding of physics go out the window. The question of a black hole’s role in a bouncing universe “is clearly interesting,” Leandros Perivolaropoulos, a physicist at the University of Ioannina in Greece who was not involved with the study, told The Daily Beast, “and this paper may be viewed as an initial attempt to address it.”īut beware: There are a lot of assumptions baked into Pérez and Romero’s argument. In other words, Pérez and Romero’s black hole survived even when everything around it got wiped out as the universe collapsed on its way to an eventual rebound. These cycles are part of what cosmologists call a possible “cosmological bounce.”Ī mathematical model of a theoretical black hole is the centerpiece of Pérez and Romero’s peer-reviewed study, which was published last month in the science journal Physical Review D. According to a new study from cosmologists Daniela Pérez and Gustavo Romero, both from the Instituto Argentino de Radioastronomía, the universe has been repeatedly expanding and contracting, and big black holes are some of the only things that have survived these endless cycles of destruction and renewal. There’s a new wrinkle in that cosmological argument, and it’s a doozy. Likewise, nobody really disagrees that, at some point many billions of years in the future, the universe is going to expand too far-and run out of energy for further expansion. No one with any expertise in astronomy or physics disagrees with that fact.
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