The 1st few seconds of the Big Bang: What we know and what we don't

The infant universe was a busy place.

Believe it or not, physicists are attempting to understand the universe when it was only a handful of seconds old.

But the situation here is complex, to say the least, and while we've made significant headway, there's still a lot left to learn. From miniature black holes to exotic interactions, the infant universe was a busy place.

The known knowns

Let's start with the general framework. 13.77 billion years ago, our universe was incredibly hot (a temperature of over a quadrillion degrees) and incredibly small (about the size of a peach). Astronomers suspect that, when our cosmos was less than a second old, it went through a period of incredibly rapid expansion, known as inflation.

This inflation event was perhaps the most transformative epoch ever to occur in the history of our universe. In less than a blink, our universe became incredibly larger (enlarging by a factor of at least 10^52). When this rapid expansion phase wound down, whatever caused inflation in the first place (we're not sure what) decayed, flooding the universe with matter and radiation (we're not sure how).

A few minutes later (literally), the first elements emerged. Prior to this time, the universe was too hot and too dense for anything stable to form — it was just a giant mix of quarks (the fundamental building blocks of atomic nuclei) and gluons (the carriers of the strong nuclear force). But once the universe was a healthy dozen minutes old, it had expanded and cooled enough that the quarks could bind themselves together, forming the first protons and neutrons. Those protons and neutrons made the first hydrogen and helium (and a little bit of lithium), which went on hundreds of millions of years later to build the first stars and galaxies. From the formation of the first elements, the universe just expanded and cooled, eventually becoming a plasma, and then a neutral gas.

While we know that this broad-brush story is correct, we also know that we're missing a lot of details, especially in the time before the formation of the first elements. Some funky physics may have been in operation when the universe was only a few seconds old, and it's currently beyond our theoretical understanding — but that doesn't stop us from trying.

The known unknowns

A paper recently appearing in the preprint journal arXiv, and accepted for publication in The Open Journal of Astrophysics, lays out some of the more exotic very-early-universe scenarios.

For example, there's the whole question about dark matter. We don't know what dark matter is made of, but we do know that it's responsible for over 80% of the matter in the universe. We have a well-understood story for how normal matter originated in the hot, dense soup of the early cosmos, but we have no clue when or how dark matter came on the scene. Did it appear in the first few seconds? Or much later? Did it mess up the cosmic chemistry that led to the first elements, or stay in the background?

We don't know.

Then there's inflation itself. We don't know what provided the power source for the incredible expansion event, we don't know why it lasted the length of time that it did, and we don't know what eventually stopped it. Perhaps inflation lingered for longer than we've been assuming, and made its presence known for an entire second, rather than the tiny fraction that we've been assuming.

Here's another one: there's this massive thorn in the side of every cosmologist known as matter-antimatter asymmetry. We see from experiments that matter and antimatter are perfectly symmetrical: for every particle of matter made in reactions throughout the universe, there's also a corresponding particle of antimatter. But when we look around the cosmos, we see heaps and heaps of normal matter and not a drop of antimatter in sight. Something huge must have happened in the first few seconds of the universe's existence to throw off that balance. But as to who or what was responsible, and the exact mechanism, we're not sure.

And if dark matter and inflation and antimatter weren't enough, there's also the possibility that the early universe might have manufactured a flood of small black holes. Black holes in the present-day cosmos (i.e., the past 13 billion years) all come from the deaths of massive stars. Those are the only places where the density of matter can reach the critical thresholds necessary to trigger black hole formation. But in the exotic early universe, random patches of the cosmos may have achieved sufficient density, triggering the creation of black holes without having to go through the whole star-formation thing first. Maybe.

Digging deeper

While our theory of the Big Bang is supported by a wealth of observational data, there are plenty of mysteries to satisfy the curiosity of generations of cosmologists. Thankfully, we're not completely blind when trying to study this early epoch.

For example, even if we can't directly see the state of the universe when it was only a few seconds old, we can try to recreate those conditions in our powerful particle colliders. It's not perfect, but it can at least teach us about the physics of those kinds of environments.

We can also look for clues left over from the first few seconds. Anything funky going on then would've left its mark on the later universe. Changing the amount of dark matter or a lingering inflation would upset the creation of hydrogen and helium, something we can measure today.

And the universe transitioned from a plasma to a neutral gas when it was 380,000 years old. The light released then has persisted in the form of the cosmic microwave background. If the universe popped out a bunch of small black holes, they would affect this afterglow light pattern.

We might even hope to observe this epoch directly. Not with light, but with gravitational waves. That chaotic inferno must have released a torrent of ripples in the fabric of space-time, which — like the cosmic microwave background — would have survived to the present day. We don't yet have the technological capability to directly observe those gravitational waves, but every day we're inching closer.

And perhaps when we do, we'll get a glimpse of the newborn universe.

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Paul M. Sutter is an astrophysicist at SUNY Stony Brook and the Flatiron Institute, host of Ask a Spaceman and Space Radio, and author of How to Die in Space. He contributed this article to Space.com's Expert Voices: Opinions and Insights.

Lincoln made Biden inevitable

Lincoln made Biden inevitable.  Lincoln was the great Usurper.  Lincoln inverted the American political scheme by enabling the creation of an all-powerful, centralized Federal government.  Biden has completed the theft.  What was once a confederated White Republic is now a plutocratic multiracial tyranny.  The Constitution is a dead letter.  Biden is the senile Usurper.  He's world history's sense of comic relief.  

From "Honest Abe" to "Traitor Joe", the results are the same. 

The American Fratricidal War resulted in the inversion of the framework of government bequeathed to us by our Founding Fathers. Whereas the antebellum Federal Government was a genuine federal system, possessed a meaningful scheme of checks and balances, and was truly limited in both delegated powers and sovereign scope, the postbellum Federal Government is a mockery of its former incarnation: one-third of the modern Federal Government (i.e., the U.S. Supreme Court, a.k.a. the judicial branch, the Zionist fifth column, the Talmudists’ Trojan horse) has taken upon itself the role of declaring “what the law is,” and the “law” has been a relentless power-grab on the part of the executive and legislative branches: this power-grab has been and is being enabled by that very same U.S. Supreme Court. The Rats became the Guardians of the proverbial cheese, and one-third of the modern Federal Government has dedicated itself to handing over as much power as it can, as fast as it can, to the other two branches of the modern Federal Government.

 "...the first time as tragedy," 

"...the second time as farce."

Zimbabwe is the next stop on this line.

Titan’s largest crater might be the perfect cradle for life: evolutionary transubstantiation

Titan’s largest crater might be the perfect cradle for life

Saturn’s frigid moon Titan has long intrigued scientists searching for life in the Solar System. Its surface is coated in organic hydrocarbons, and its icy crust is thought to cover a watery ocean. An asteroid or comet slamming into the moon could theoretically mix these two ingredients, according to a new study, with the resulting impact craters providing an ideal place for life to get started.

The idea is “very exciting,” says Léa Bonnefoy, a planetary scientist and Titan expert at the University of Paris. “If you have a lot of liquid water creating a temporary warm pool on the surface, then you can have conditions that would be favorable for life,” she says. And, “If you have organic material cycling from the surface into the ocean, then that makes the ocean a bit more habitable.”

Scientists have believed an ocean sits about 100 kilometers below Titan’s crust ever since 2012, when NASA’s Cassini mission measured sight variations in the moon’s tides. Alvaro Penteado Crósta, a planetary geologist at the University of Campinas, knew the moon was pocked with many large impact craters. He wondered whether any of the impacts were big enough to pierce the crust and churn up the surface’s organic material with the water below. That may have produced “a primordial soup that you would need for life to develop,” Penteado Crósta says.

To find out, he and his colleagues modeled the impact for the moon’s largest crater, 425-kilometer-wide Menrva, thought to have formed 1 billion years ago. The model suggested the crater resulted from a 34-kilometer-wide space rock hitting the surface at 7 kilometers per second.

The heat of the impact would have created a lake in the crater, according to the model, which the team presented this week at the Lunar and Planetary Science Conference. The lake would likely only have existed for 1 million years before freezing over in Titan’s frosty temperatures. But Penteado Crósta says this may have been enough time for microbes to evolve, taking advantage of liquid water, organic molecules, and heat from the impact. “That’s pretty good for bacteria.”

Although the team’s research focused on Menrva, Penteado Crósta says it is possible that smaller impacts were sufficient to break through Titan’s ice shell, perhaps even at Selk—a 90-kilometer-wide crater about 5000 kilometers away. Selk is thought to be much younger than Menrva, perhaps just a few hundred million years old, which would mean any evidence of life there would be fresher. “Selk may have more chance to have some sort of fossilized bacteria preserved in the ice,” Penteado Crósta says.

Selk is the planned landing site for NASA’s Dragonfly mission, a $1 billion autonomous and nuclear-powered drone set to launch in 2027 and arrive on Titan 2036. If the impact did break the ice crust here, the mission could find out.

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Entire article available here.

How lightning strikes could explain the origin of life—on Earth and elsewhere

A new study suggests that lightning helps make an essential element available to organisms in habitable environments.

The search for life on other planets is a lot like cooking. (Bear with me for a second.) You can have all the ingredients in one place—water, a warm climate and thick atmosphere, the proper nutrients, organic material, and a source of energy—but if you don’t have any processes or conditions that can actually do something with those ingredients, you’ve just got a bunch of raw materials going nowhere. 

So sometimes, life needs a spark of inspiration—or maybe several trillion of them. A new study published in Nature Communications suggests lightning may have been a key component in making phosphorus available for organisms to use when life on Earth first appeared by about 3.5 billion years ago. Phosphorus is essential for making DNA, RNA, ATP (the energy source of all known life), and other biological components like cell membranes. 

“This study was actually a lucky discovery,” says Benjamin Hess, a Yale University researcher and lead author of the new paper. “It opens up new possibilities for finding life on Earth-like planets.”

This isn’t the first time lightning has been suggested as a vital part of what made life possible on Earth. Lab experiments have demonstrated that organic materials produced by lightning could have included precursor compounds like amino acids (which can join to form proteins).

This new study discusses the role of lightning in a different way, though. A big question scientists have always pondered has to do with the way early life on Earth accessed phosphorus. Although there was plenty of water and carbon dioxide available to work with billions of years ago, phosphorus was wrapped up in insoluble, unreactive rocks. In other words, the phosphorus was basically locked away for good.

How did organisms get access to this essential element? The prevailing theory has been that meteorites delivered phosphorus to Earth in the form of a mineral called schreibersite—which can dissolve in water, making it readily available for life forms to use. The big problem with this idea is that when life began over 3.5 to 4.5 billion years ago, meteorite impacts were declining exponentially. The planet needed a lot of phosphorus-containing schreibersite to sustain life. And meteorite impacts would also have been destructive enough to, well, kill off nascent life prematurely (see: the dinosaurs) or vaporize most of the schreibersite being delivered. 

Hess and his colleagues believe they have found the solution. Schreibersite is also found in glass materials called fulgurites, which are formed when lighting hits Earth. When fulgurite forms, it incorporates phosphorus from terrestrial rocks. And it’s soluble in water. 

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Full article available here.

Polish member of European Parliament hammers Judeo-plutocracy

 

“Antisemitism": You decide.

 What is "antisemitism"?

“Antisemitism is a certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.”

or

Antisemitism is accurately describing organized Jewry's behavior.

Organic materials essential for life on Earth are found for the first time on the surface of an asteroid

 

New research from Royal Holloway, has found water and organic matter on the surface of an asteroid sample returned from the inner Solar System. This is the first time that organic materials, which could have provided chemical precursors for the origin of life on Earth, have been found on an asteroid.

The single grain sample was returned to Earth from asteroid Itokawa by JAXA's first Hayabusa mission in 2010. The sample shows that water and organic matter that originate from the asteroid itself have evolved chemically through time.

The research paper suggests that Itokawa has been constantly evolving over billions of years by incorporating water and organic materials from foreign extra-terrestrial material, just like the Earth. In the past, the asteroid will have gone through extreme heating, dehydration and shattering due to catastrophic impact. However, despite this, the asteroid came back together from the shattered fragments and rehydrated itself with water that was delivered via the in fall of dust or carbon-rich meteorites.

This study shows that S-type asteroids, where most of Earth's meteorites come from, such as Itokawa, contain the raw ingredients of life. The analysis of this asteroid changes traditional views on the origin of life on Earth which have previously heavily focused on C-type carbon-rich asteroids.

Dr. Queenie Chan from the Department of Earth Sciences at Royal Holloway, said: "The Hayabusa mission was a robotic spacecraft developed by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency to return samples from a small near-Earth asteroid named Itokawa, for detailed analysis in laboratories on Earth.

"After being studied in great detail by an international team of researchers, our analysis of a single grain, nicknamed 'Amazon,' has preserved both primitive (unheated) and processed (heated) organic matter within ten microns (a thousandth of a centimeter) of distance.

"The organic matter that has been heated indicates that the asteroid had been heated to over 600°C in the past. The presence of unheated organic matter very close to it, means that the in fall of primitive organics arrived on the surface of Itokawa after the asteroid had cooled down."

Dr. Chan, continues: "Studying Amazon has allowed us to better understand how the asteroid constantly evolved by incorporating newly-arrived exogenous water and organic compounds.

"These findings are really exciting as they reveal complex details of an asteroid's history and how its evolution pathway is so similar to that of the prebiotic Earth.

"The success of this mission and the analysis of the sample that returned to Earth has since paved the way for a more detailed analysis of carbonaceous material returned by missions such as JAXA's Hayabusa2 and NASA's OSIRIS-Rex missions. Both of these missions have identified exogeneous materials on the target asteroids Ryugu and Bennu, respectively. Our findings suggest that mixing of materials is a common process in our solar system."

SIC ITUR AD ASTRA!

The world as a neural network

Abstract: 

We discuss a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. We identify two different types of dynamical degrees of freedom: “trainable” variables (e.g. bias vector or weight matrix) and “hidden” variables (e.g. state vector of neurons). We first consider stochastic evolution of the trainable variables to argue that near equilibrium their dynamics is well approximated by Madelung equations (with free energy representing the phase) and further away from the equilibrium by Hamilton-Jacobi equations (with free energy representing the Hamilton’s principal function). This shows that the trainable variables can indeed exhibit classical and quantum behaviors with the state vector of neurons representing the hidden variables. We then study stochastic evolution of the hidden variables by considering D non-interacting subsystems with average state vectors, x¯ 1 , ..., x¯ D and an overall average state vector x¯ 0 . In the limit when the weight matrix is a permutation matrix, the dynamics of x¯ µ can be described in terms of relativistic strings in an emergent D + 1 dimensional Minkowski space-time. If the subsystems are minimally interacting, with interactions described by a metric tensor, then the emergent space-time becomes curved. We argue that the entropy production in such a system is a local function of the metric tensor which should be determined by the symmetries of the Onsager tensor. It turns out that a very simple and highly symmetric Onsager tensor leads to the entropy production described by the Einstein-Hilbert term. This shows that the learning dynamics of a neural network can indeed exhibit approximate behaviors described by both quantum mechanics and general relativity. We also discuss a possibility that the two descriptions are holographic duals of each other. 

To this end, Vanchurin concludes:

In this paper we discussed a possibility that the entire universe on its most fundamental level is a neural network. This is a very bold claim. We are not just saying that the artificial neural networks can be useful for analyzing physical systems or for discovering physical laws, we are saying that this is how the world around us actually works. With this respect it could be considered as a proposal for the theory of everything, and as such it should be easy to prove it wrong. All that is needed is to find a physical phenomenon which cannot be described by neural networks. Unfortunately (or fortunately) it is easier said than done.

Full paper available here.