When you mix particle movement simulations with modeling gravity you get a simulation of the Universe just after it was born. Back then the Universe was so small it would fit about a million times inside a single proton.
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The current Universe is truly gigantic, full of stars, galaxies, gas, dust, and all that other stuff. By just looking at it you would have never guessed that there was a time you could have easily stepped on it. Or even not be able to truly see it. The earliest moments of the freshly born Universe were incredibly extreme but also important and happened in a space smaller than anything you can truly imagine.
Recently, Jens Niemeyer from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen and his colleagues analyzed the earliest moments of the Universe that took place after the still mysterious period of cosmological inflation that happened about 10 to the power of -36 to 10 to the power of -32 seconds after the Big Bang itself. The results indicate that back then the Universe was mostly resembling a quantum furnace that went crazy creating structures that further affected the Universe’s destiny.
Niemeyer’s team mixed an exotic drink of particle movement simulations with quantum gravitational modeling. Their quantum simulation was set that about 20 kilograms worth of mass into a space the size of roughly 10 to the power of -20 which roughly corresponds to the size of the Universe when it was just 10 to the power of -24 seconds old. That about one yoctosend or 0.00000000000000000000001 seconds.
The researchers focused on the evolution of the Universe right after the inflation period. Their quantum simulation shows then when particles were appearing from the quantum wave foam something called inflation halos that were dense enough to bend spacetime itself. These halos might have contributed towards the creation of primordial black holes – if they existed. While the inflation halos should have had a very short lifespan and quickly vanished into a tangle of elementary particles. But their existence left some marks.
The creators of the study are convinced that these structures in the extremely young Universe, their creation, movement, and interactions had to create gravitational wave noise. The quantum simulation of the Universe could increase our understanding of such a primordial signal. There is a chance these gravitational waves still flow through the Universe and we might be able to detect them.
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