- A new theory says that Big Bang was a starting point of an anti-universe, a mirror image of the present universe.
- In anti-universe, time flows in the opposite direction and antimatter dominates.
The Big Bang cosmology describes the history and future of the universe. Studies show that the earliest phases the universe’s existence took place 13.8 billion (±21 million) years ago.
Within the first picosecond of its formation, it experienced a phenomenal burst of expansion called inflation. The four fundamental forces – gravity, electromagnetic, strong and weak – came into existence within this period of time.
According to NASA, space didn’t exist before the universe, it’s better to consider Big Bang as the simultaneous appearance of space everywhere in the universe. Space itself has been expanding and carrying matter with it.
As of now, we don’t know for sure how our universe formed, but it looks asymmetrical from a specific vantage point. We are currently living in the universe where space expands, times goes forward and there is more matter than antimatter.
All these things appear to violate CPT symmetry – a fundamental symmetry that states that a mirror image of our universe, with all matter replaced by anti-matter and with all momenta reversed (time running in reverse), would evolve under current physical laws.
The combinations of CPT stands for Charge conjugation, Parity transformation, and Time reversal. In simple language, CPT symmetry says that the laws of physics won’t change if you reverse/flip time, space, and matter-antimatter all together.x
Was Big Bang a Starting Point of an Anti-Universe?
Recently, researchers at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (Canada) and University of Manchester (United Kingdom) proposed a new theory that says the Big Bang was starting point of an anti-universe, a mirror image of the present universe where antimatter is more than matter and time runs in the opposite direction.
They showed that such a CPT-symmetric system is consistent with cosmic expansion history and also explains the existence of dark matter.
Reference: Phys. Rev. Lett. | doi:10.1103/PhysRevLett.121.251301 | APS Physics
The CPT-symmetric model estimates that our universe went through a small era of incredible expansion instantly after the Big Bang, which explains some cosmological events but it also requires the presence of another phenomenon called quantum fields.
However, the research team showed that their new theory explains the evolution of cosmos without formulating any new physical laws. In the CPT-symmetric system, space and time run continuously across the Big Bang, whereas the anti-universe acts like a mirror image (of the present Universe) where time flows in negative direction.
Also, this new model well explains the dark matter: the CPT-symmetric Universe would generate an enormous amount of superheavy sterile neutrinos, which could be the source of high-energy cosmic rays that were recorded in the recent years.
Read: Does Universe Iterates Through Infinite Numbers of Big Bangs?
In near future, the team will investigate whether this model can be used as an alternative to inflation to explain specific events like the uniformity of the cosmos on massive scales.
