The Birth Of Everything That Ever Existed
By Ashfaq Ali M S
Cosmofluencer (Season 2)
New research has led us to find the oldest black hole yet. The black hole can be seen existing in the past, just 470 million years after the Big Bang. If you scale the life of the universe into a calendar year, 470 million years fall somewhere in the 2nd week of January.
But at such an early stage of the life of the universe, finding a black hole that is 10 million times more massive than our sun is unusual. How is it possible for such old galaxies to have supermassive black holes in the infancy of the universe?
It is possible that these black holes might have formed due to the death of a star, and grew in size as it fed on more matter. Or they might have formed due to the sudden collapse of enormous clouds of gas.
The latter seems more plausible as the sustenance of a black hole depends on its birth mass. The higher the birth mass, the higher the chance for it to grow and sustain itself. But looking at this phenomenon again gives us this data:
A supermassive black hole was found in the galaxy UHZ1. The light from this galaxy traveled for 13.3 billion years to reach us.
However, the age of our universe, as we know it, is about 13.7 billion years. When our universe “started”, i.e., at the initiation of the Big Bang, it was born out of a singularity, such as a black hole. This singularity that existed before the universe had the entire mass of the universe in it.
So is it possible that rather than the Big Bang being one single explosion that led to a uniform universe, it exploded into packets of smaller singularities with lesser masses than the initial big singularity?
And that not all of the mass burst out into packets of singularity, but some was dispersed in other ways? In other words, what if the explosion that eventually led to our existence wasn’t homogeneous?
If this theory stands to be accurate, then it’s possible that the supermassive black holes so early in the life of our universe are these smaller packets of singularity, and the dispersed mass led to the formation of galaxies around them.
Realizing this makes one understand that the birth of our universe was not inconsequential. Rather it was a complex phenomenon which has an impact on each and everyone’s lives, on earth or otherwise.
Those early stages of the universe were the ones that decided the fate of each and every life (carbon-based or otherwise) that has grazed our oval universe.
Conclusion
The birth of our universe is as ambiguous as its eventual end (if there really is an end!). Continuously learning new things about our beginnings makes us wonder what else we are ignorant about in the early universe. We try to understand the laws of nature and come up with very complex sciences and fields of study, while the very birth of our universe, the one process that led to what we can observe right now, eludes us. The laws of the universe were born with the universe itself. So, saying that one understands the laws without fully knowing how they came to be, would be erroneous.
But why is the beginning so ambiguous? Why can’t it be a simple ‘Big Bang’? Is it because it wasn’t just a birth but also a death? And what did death mean before the Big Bang? How is death possible before T=0? The question begs for a better definition of the so-called genesis.