The star, by this point, has turned into a black hole, which means that its gravitational pull is so severe that not even a beam of light can escape. Gravity pulls everything into an increasingly fierce grip. When such a star runs out of fuel, its core collapses inward. Black holes are the corpses of giant stars. This precisely describes what is created inside a black hole. But one compelling idea is that the seed of a universe is similar to the seed of a plant: It's a chunk of essential material, tightly compressed, hidden inside a protective shell. How, or even if, one universe is linked to another is a source of much debate, all of it highly speculative and, as of now, completely unprovable. Instead, we may be part of the multiverse, an immense array of separate universes, each its own shining orb in the true night sky. It's important to know, before we go further, that over the last couple of decades, many theoretical physicists have come to believe that our universe is not the only one. (See " Star Eater" in this month's National Geographic magazine.) So how is such a seed created? One idea, bandied about for several years-notably by Nikodem Poplawski of the University of New Haven-is that the seed of our universe was forged in the ultimate kiln, likely the most extreme environment in all of nature: inside a black hole. If you really want to call something the God particle, this seed seems an ideal fit. And yet it's a particle that can spark the production of every other particle, not to mention every galaxy, solar system, planet, and person. This seed is thought to have been almost unimaginably tiny, possibly trillions of times smaller than any particle humans have been able to observe. Let's call it the seed of a new universe. These physicists theorize that, a moment before the Big Bang, all the mass and energy of the nascent universe was compacted into an incredibly dense-yet finite-speck. Such notions are beyond human understanding.īut a few unconventional scientists disagree. We'll never understand what pre-Big Bang reality was like, or what it was formed of, or why it exploded to create our universe. Time began ticking, they insist, at the instant of the Big Bang, and pondering anything earlier isn't in the realm of science. This happened 13.8 billion years ago.īut what about before that? Many physicists say there is no before that. Before humans existed, before Earth formed, before the sun ignited, before galaxies arose, before light could even shine, there was the Big Bang.
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