Scientists Find Remnants Of A Universe That Existed Before This One

For humans and any other intelligent life out there, the universe is the be all and end all — everything comes and goes within it.

However, new observations suggest something else came before the Big Bang. Scientists caught wind of traces of ancient black holes in the cosmos, pointing at an existence of another universe that existed before the current one.

Sky Circles Hints At A Universe Before Big Bang

In a paper published online on arXiv, researchers say that distinct cyclic patterns in the sky could be the last vestiges of black holes that survived the end of a previous universe.

"What we claim we're seeing is the final remnant after a black hole has evaporated away in the previous aeon," Roger Penrose, study coauthor and cocreator of the conformal cyclic cosmology theory, tells New Scientist.

The findings of the paper support the CCC theory, which contradicts the more widely accepted assumption that there was a single Big Bang that triggered the creation of the universe. Instead, it suggests that the universe goes through an endless cycle of Big Bang and Big Crunch events.

According to IFLScience, the late Stephen Hawking predicted that black holes emit small amounts of radiation, which Penrose and his team suggest is able to survive from one eon to the next. The Hawking radiation, they say, is what remains from the previous universe. 

These remnants, dubbed as "Hawking points" by the researchers, could be detected in the cosmic microwave background. It would appear as circles of light that were previously named anomalous points caused by interstellar dust.

The study authors explain in that these Hawking points strongly support the CCC theory of a constantly recycling universe.

"Although of extremely low temperature at emission, in CCC this radiation is enormously concentrated by the conformal compression of the entire future of the black hole, resulting in a single point at the crossover into our current aeon," the team wrote in the paper.

What Critics Say

Not everyone is convinced of CCC, however. IFLScience points that there's been no evidence of Hawking radiation or Hawking points, so far.

Penrose points out in a report from Metro News that Hawking points aren't visible in the data yet because current CMB measurements only go back to 380,000 years after the Big Bang. However, he says that rings of polarized light that may indicate the presence of these points have already been spotted.

"I would need to see more details to be convinced by their claim," Olivier Dore, a cosmologist from NASA, says, according to Metro News.