The Big Bang is often considered the starting point of our universe, but two researchers have proposed an idea that does not point at Big Bang as the event that catapulted the formation of the cosmos.
Saurya Das from the University of Lethbridge in Canada and Ahmed Farag Ali from Egypt's Benha University have suggested that the Big Bang did not mark the birth of the universe.
The physicists said that quantum mechanics suggests that the universe did not start with the Big Bang but instead has existed forever, which means that the cosmos did not have a beginning and does not have an end.
The duo's proposition was based on a new model they have created that applied quantum correction terms to Einstein's theory of general relativity, which predicts that the universe originated when an infinitely dense single point exploded outwards about 13.8 billion years ago.
This state, known as singularity, poses several problems for scientists because it did not take into account what happened before or at the moment of the Big Bang. By removing singularity, the model predicts that the universe does not have a beginning and has always exited in quantum potential before it collapsed into the Big Bang.
"As far as we can see, since different points in the universe never actually converged in the past, it did not have a beginning," Saurya Das said. "'It lasted forever. It will also not have an end ... In other words, there is no singularity."
Brian Koberlein from the Rochester Institute of Technology pointed out that while it may appear that the study suggests that the Big Bang did not happen, the event still occurred.
"The big bang is a robust scientific theory that isn't going away, and this new paper does nothing to question its legitimacy," he wrote on his website.
Koberlein said that the researchers used the Raychaudhuri equation, which used some quantum tweaks. He also said that the idea of an eternal universe is not new.
The new model, which also considered dark matter and dark energy, also predicts a cosmological constant, an idea initially proposed by Einstein nearly 100 years ago, which posits that the universe is static instead of expanding.
"We expect our main results to continue to hold even if and when a fully satisfactory theory of quantum gravity is formulated," the researchers wrote in a study published in the Physics Letter B on Jan.6. "For the cosmological constant problem at late times on the other hand, quantum gravity effects are practically absent and can be safely ignored."