The Big Bang is the phenomenon that many attribute to mark the origin of the universe. The widely accepted theory claims that the universe developed when it exploded out of singularity, which is marked by a point of zero volume and infinite density.
"The entire Universe was inside a bubble that was thousands of times smaller than a pinhead. It was hotter and denser than anything we can imagine," The European Space Agency (ESA) website explained in simpler terms. "Then it suddenly exploded."
Scientists do not know what triggered the explosion that the Big Bang theory is founded on as the laws of physics cease to operate in a singularity and this is where problems with the theory arise. Scientists are puzzled as to how something bizarre and chaotic could evolve into an orderly universe.
One possible way of knowing what could have caused the cataclysmic blast that gave birth to the universe about 13.8 billion years ago, would be to know what came before the Big Bang and a team of three researchers had a theory.
The idea of Niayesh Afshordi, from the Perimeter Institute in Canada, and colleagues claims that what may have been believed as the Big Bang, could actually be the collapse of a star in a four-dimensional universe that is different from our own. The group proposed that our three-dimensional universe may actually be just a "wrapping" around the event horizon of a four dimensional black hole.
When the research team modeled the collapse of the four-dimensional star, they observed that the materials that were ejected formed a 3D brane that surrounds the three-dimensional event horizon and eventually started to expand. The researchers came up with the theory that the universe that we know of was never inside the singularity and was instead formed from the debris of a star in the four dimensional universe that collapsed into a black hole.
"We show that the singularity always happens inside a white hole horizon, and only happens later than Big Bang Nucleosysntheis (BBN) for a small corner of the allowed parameter space," the trio wrote. "This yields an alternative holographic origin for the big bang, in which our universe emerges from the collapse a 5D star into a black hole, reminiscent of an astrophysical core-collapse supernova."
