No evidence of time before Big Bang

Latest research deflates the idea that the Universe cycles for eternity.

Edwin Cartlidge

Circular ripples in the cosmic microwave background have been making waves with theoreticians.NASA

Our view of the early Universe may be full of mysterious circles — and even triangles — but that doesn't mean we're seeing evidence of events that took place before the Big Bang. So says a trio of papers taking aim at a recent claim that concentric rings of uniform temperature within the cosmic microwave background — the radiation left over from the Big Bang — might, in fact, be the signatures of black holes colliding in a previous cosmic 'aeon' that existed before our Universe.
The provocative idea was posited by Vahe Gurzadyan of Yerevan Physics Institute in Armenia and celebrated theoretical physicist Roger Penrose of the University of Oxford, UK. In a recent paper¹, posted on the arXiv preprint server, Gurzadyan and Penrose argue that collisions between supermassive black holes from before the Big Bang would generate spherically propagating gravitational waves that would, in turn, leave characteristic circles within the cosmic microwave background.
To verify this claim, Gurzadyan examined seven years' worth of data from NASA's Wilkinson Microwave Anisotropy Probe (WMAP) satellite, calculating the change in temperature variance within progressively larger rings around more than 10,000 points in the microwave sky. And indeed, he identified a number of rings within the WMAP data that had a temperature variance that was markedly lower than that of the surrounding sky.

Cosmic cycle

Most cosmologists believe that the Universe, and with it space and time, exploded into being some 13.7 billion years ago at the Big Bang, and that it has been expanding ever since. A crucial component of the standard cosmological model — needed to explain why the Universe is so uniform — is the idea that a fraction of a second after the Big Bang, the Universe underwent a brief period of extremely rapid expansion known as inflation.

Vahe Gurzadyan and Roger Penrose.V.Gurzadyan, R.Penrose

Penrose, however, thinks that the Universe's great uniformity instead originates from before the Big Bang, from the tail end of a previous aeon that saw the Universe expand to become infinitely large and very smooth. That aeon in turn was born in a Big Bang that emerged from the end of a still earlier aeon, and so on, creating a potentially infinite cycle with no beginning and no end.
Now Gurzadyan and Penrose's idea is being challenged by three independent studies, all posted on the arXiv server within the past few days, by Ingunn Wehus and Hans Kristian Eriksen of the University of Oslo²; Adam Moss, Douglas Scott and James Zibin of the University of British Columbia³ in Vancouver, Canada; and Amir Hajian of the Canadian Institute for Theoretical Astrophysics in Toronto, Ontario⁴.
All three groups reproduced Gurzadyan's analysis of the WMAP data and all agree that the data do contain low-variance circles. Where they part company with the earlier work is in the significance that they attribute to these circles.

Circles of significance

To gauge this significance, Gurzadyan compared the observed circles with a simulation of the cosmic microwave background in which temperature fluctuations were completely scale invariant, meaning that their abundance was independent of their size. In doing so, he found that there ought not to be any patterns. But the groups who are critical of his work say that this is not what the cosmic microwave background is like.

 

They point out that the WMAP data clearly show that there are far more hot and cold spots at smaller angular scales, and that it is therefore wrong to assume that the microwave sky is isotropic. All three groups searched for circular variance patterns in simulations of the cosmic microwave background that assume the basic properties of the inflationary Universe, and all found circles that are very similar to the ones in the WMAP data.
Moss and his colleagues even carried out a slight variation of the exercise and found that both the observational data and the inflationary simulations also contain concentric regions of low variance in the shape of equilateral triangles. "The result obtained by Gurzadyan and Penrose does not in any way provide evidence for Penrose's cyclical model of the Universe over standard inflation," says Zibin.
Gurzadyan dismisses the critical analyses as "absolutely trivial", arguing that there is bound to be agreement between the standard cosmological model and the WMAP data "at some confidence level" but that a different model, such as Penrose's, might fit the data "even better" " — a point he makes in a response to the three critical papers also posted on arXiv⁵. However, he is not prepared to state that the circles constitute evidence of Penrose's model. "We have found some signatures that carry properties predicted by the model," he says. 

• References

  1. Gurzadyan, V. G. and Penrose, R. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1011.3706 (2010).
  2. Wehus, I. K. and Eriksen, H. K. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1268 (2010).
  3. Moss, A., Scott, D. and Zibin, J. P. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1305 (2010).
  4. Hajian, A. Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1656 (2010).
  5. Gurzadyan, V. and Penrose, R Preprint at http://arxiv.org/abs/1012.1486 (2010).

Let's revist Mt. Merapi

However, let me be clear that I dont' think there are any Easy Answers to any earthchanges!!


Earthquakes lead to increased volcanic activity
Malaysia Sun
Wednesday 11th April, 2007
(ANI)
http://story. malaysiasun. com/index. php/ct/9/ cid/89d96798a395 64bd/id/240773/ cs/1/
(okay. I did try to fix the link, I really did!!)

Washington, Apr 11 : Scientists using NASA satellite data have found strong evidence that a major earthquake can lead to a nearly immediate increase in regional volcanic activity.

The intensity of two ongoing volcanic eruptions on Indonesia's Java Island increased sharply three days following a powerful, 6.4-magnitude earthquake on the island in May 2006. The increased volcanic activity further persisted for about nine days.

"During this period, we found clear evidence that the earthquake caused both volcanoes to release greater amounts of heat, and lava emission surged to two to three times higher than prior to the tremor," said lead author of the study, Andrew Harris, from the University of Hawaii, Honolulu.

While scientists have long debated whether earthquakes can trigger new volcanic eruptions, this study linked an earthquake to enhanced volcanic activity at two ongoing eruptions that were being closely monitored by satellite-based sensors on a daily basis.

At the time of the earthquake, each volcano was being checked for changes in heat output by satellite sensors as part of a routine global "hot spot" monitoring effort that uses near real-time satellite data from NASA's Terra and Aqua satellites.

Maps of worldwide hot spot activity are created with data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument on these satellites, pinpointing locations where surface temperatures are much hotter than their surroundings.

Researchers combined these data with other details about the Indonesian volcanoes gathered by the satellites to analyze temperature and lava output rates at both volcanoes over a 35-day period spanning the earthquake.

They found that the two volcanoes, Merapi and Semeru, which are about 260 kilometres apart and roughly 50 kilometres north and 280 kilometres east of the earthquake epicentre, showed an increase in eruption rate due to underground stresses from the earthquake's seismic waves.

The seismic waves pumped magma -- molten rock beneath the surface -- into the conduit to the surface, increasing eruption rates.

"The responses at Merapi and Semeru lagged about three days behind the triggering earthquake, which may reflect the time it took the change felt by magma residing at deeper levels to be transmitted to the surface," said Harris.

The researchers said that regional earthquake events had sufficient power to modify the intensity of activity at ongoing eruptions, although they may not always be able to trigger new volcanic eruptions.

According to their findings, the Java earthquake had a significant influence on the volcanoes for a relatively short period of several days.

"Eruptions must be closely and continuously monitored in the days immediately before, during and after an earthquake if we are to link any earthquake with enhanced volcanic activity," added Harris.

The research was recently published in the American Geophysical Union's Geophysical Research Letters.