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Within this framework, relic black holes emerge from a universe that contracted before rebounding into expansion rather than beginning from a single origin.<\/p>\n
By tracing how structures behave across that transition, Enrique Gazta\u00f1aga at the University of Portsmouth<\/a> showed that some compact objects would persist through a \u201ccosmic bounce.\u201d<\/p>\n Black holes born before the Big Bang<\/p>\n A cosmic bounce describes a universe that first shrinks down to an extremely small, tightly packed state, where matter is compressed to its limits.<\/p>\n Instead of collapsing into nothing, that compression stops and reverses, causing the universe to expand outward again into the large, growing cosmos we observe today.<\/p>\n Space then begins expanding again, carrying forward whatever structures managed to survive the transition.<\/p>\n Those survivors would not form anew after the hot beginning but instead retain properties shaped during the earlier collapse, pointing toward additional relics that could still influence the universe today.<\/p>\n Beyond one beginning<\/p>\n Standard cosmology still explains a remarkable amount about how the universe expanded and how matter spread out.<\/p>\n That picture also matches faint leftover light from the early universe and the broad spread of galaxies.<\/p>\n Planck measurements<\/a> <\/a>place dark matter, invisible mass seen by gravity, at about five times ordinary matter in a 13.8-billion-year-old universe.<\/p>\n Bounce models reopen those problems by replacing one explosive start with a collapse that turns around instead of breaking physics outright.\u00a0<\/p>\n Where physics breaks down<\/p>\n In Einstein\u2019s equations, the usual Big Bang runs backward to a singularity<\/a>, a point where current physics stops making usable predictions.<\/p>\n Gazta\u00f1aga argued that warning sign mattered because infinities often tell physicists their description has gone past its safe range.<\/p>\n \u201cSingularities often signal that our theoretical description has reached its limits,\u201d said Prof. Gazta\u00f1aga.\u00a0<\/p>\n His alternative lets contraction reach an extreme but finite density, then reverse before the math stops making sense.<\/p>\n Pressure changes everything<\/p>\n Near that turnaround, the model says extreme compression built quantum pressure<\/a> that pushed back against further collapse.<\/p>\n Similar pressure already helps white dwarfs and neutron stars avoid endless squeezing, so the idea borrows a familiar stabilizing effect.<\/p>\n In this picture, the rebound also mimics inflation<\/a>, a burst of extremely rapid early expansion, without adding a separate trigger.<\/p>\n Because the same setup may also connect to today\u2019s faster expansion, the proposal tries to tackle several puzzles at once.<\/p>\n Some objects can\u2019t survive<\/p>\n Size determines what survives the bounce, because only objects larger than about 295 feet could remain beyond the cosmic horizon and avoid being disrupted.<\/p>\n Objects or ripples that stay outside that limit avoid being rearranged, because forces cannot act across them during the crossing.<\/p>\n Calculations suggested surviving relics could include gravitational waves<\/a>, ripples in spacetime, along with compact objects and dense clumps.<\/p>\n That broad menu matters because different survivors would leave different fingerprints in later galaxies and in the sky.<\/p>\n Black holes may behave as dark matter<\/p>\n In galaxies, relic black holes would act like the unseen mass already inferred from orbital speeds and the broad arrangement of galaxies.<\/p>\n If they exist in huge numbers, they would behave as dark matter because gravity does not care whether matter glows.<\/p>\n Unlike many particle ideas, this version would not need an undiscovered ingredient, only ancient objects surviving an earlier collapse.<\/p>\n Abundance is the hard part, because too few relics would explain almost nothing and too many would break existing limits.<\/p>\n Seeds of the first galaxies<\/p>\n Another payoff appears during the earliest phase of galaxy building, where preexisting black holes could give the first galaxies a head start.<\/p>\n Webb has already found compact red objects<\/a> that often seem tied to feeding black holes, including little red dots.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIf massive black holes already existed immediately after the bounce, the early Universe would not need to start from scratch when building the first galaxies,\u201d Gazta\u00f1aga said.<\/p>\n That would ease the race to explain why some enormous black holes appeared so early in cosmic history.<\/p>\n Signals in waiting<\/p>\n Evidence for a collapse phase before the Big Bang, a period when the universe was shrinking instead of expanding, would have to arrive indirectly in patterns no telescope has yet pinned down.<\/p>\n One target is a background of relic gravitational waves, which would preserve motion from the earlier phase.<\/p>\n Another is the cosmic microwave background (CMB<\/a>), leftover light from the hot young universe, where subtle patterns could hold older scars.<\/p>\n Small effects from ancient compact objects could also bend light or stir hot gas, giving future surveys something to rule in or out.<\/p>\n Many questions still remain<\/p>\n Big claims invite hard checks, and this one depends on assumptions about how structures formed during contraction.<\/p>\n Those assumptions set how many relics survive, how massive they become, and whether they group together in ways astronomy would notice.<\/p>\n Competing ideas still explain dark matter with particles, and other models try to account for early black holes without a bounce.<\/p>\n \u201cBut if the Universe did experience a bounce, the dark structures shaping galaxies today could be remnants from a cosmic epoch that preceded the Big Bang,\u201d Gazta\u00f1aga added.<\/p>\n Seen as a whole, the proposal turns black holes into possible messengers from before the hot beginning \u2013 not just debris from it.<\/p>\n Better maps of early light, compact objects, and gravitational waves will decide whether this idea stays provocative or becomes useful.<\/p>\n The study is published in the journal Physical Review D<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n Like what you read? Subscribe to our newsletter<\/a> for engaging articles, exclusive content, and the latest updates.<\/p>\n Check us out on EarthSnap<\/a>, a free app brought to you by Eric Ralls<\/a> and Earth.com.<\/p>\n \u2014\u2013<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Researchers have found that black holes formed before the Big Bang could still exist today as surviving relics.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":599786,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[199,79],"class_list":["post-599785","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-physics","tag-physics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599785","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=599785"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/599785\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/599786"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=599785"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=599785"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=599785"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}