Well at least that explains what happened to your lost keys. Picture: NatureSource: Supplied
WHAT if we told you the Big Bang was a myth?
Cosmologists have speculated that the universe was created after a star collapsed into a black hole - a theory that helps to explain why it seems to be expanding in all directions.
The Big Bang theory suggests that the universe was created from a single point in the universe but despite years of research, nobody yet knows what triggered the eruption.
It also fails to explain why the Universe has an "almost completely uniform temperature."
"There does not seem to have been enough time since the birth of the cosmos for it to have reached temperature equilibrium," researchers explain in the scientific journal, Nature.
Astrophysicists from the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Canada have released a paper discussing a previous theory out of Germany that posited that the universe is a three-dimensional "membrane" floating through a four-dimensional "bulk universe".
A bulk universe is a very complicated concept out of string theory that puts forward the idea that space is a plane of infinite dimensions through which other planes of infinite dimensions float.
The team claimed that if the "bulk universe" contained four dimensional stars, some of them could collapse and cause black holes in the same way that stars in our universe do - they turn in supernovae, ejecting their outerlayers while their inner layers collapse into the black hole.
Black holes in our universe are spherical in shape and possess some kind of "membrane" that keep them that way. These "membranes" are known as "event horizons". Anything that passes through this event horizon is done for, because the gravitational pull is so great it makes escape impossible. In our universe only a two dimensional object is capable of becoming an event horizon within a black hole, Nature explained. Whereas in a bulk universe, the event horizon of a four dimensional black hole would have to be three dimensional, known as a "hypersphere".
Confused yet? We don't blame you.
In a nutshell this means that a star floating through a multidimensional plane got sucked into a black hole, half of it got swallowed up and the other half that survived spawned the creation of the universe.
The fact that our universe is expanding in all directions could be a sign simply of cosmic expansion, rather than as the origin of the universe itself, the researchers suggest.
"Astronomers measured that expansion and extrapolated back that the Universe must have begun with a Big Bang - but that is just a mirage," said team member Niayesh Afshordi.
However, the theory has some holes. (Get it, holes?)
So far it doesn't entirely answer how the expansion of the universe occurred.
The European Space Agency recorded slight fluctuations in the temperature of the universe and found that the cosmos contained imprints of radiation that matched predictions made in the Big Bang theory. Obviously this creates a discrepancy in the astrophysicists' research.
The scientists say they're going back to the drawing board to adjust their model.
Stay tuned. Everything we may know about the universe may be wrong.
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