THESE SWIRLS OF LIGHT COULD BE SIGNS OF A PREVIOUS UNIVERSE EXISTING BEFORE OURS

Most cosmologists agree we live in an expanding Universe that started as a point, called a singularity, and that we don’t know what happened before it, or what could lie in our future.

However, a recent discovery might indicate that a universe existed before the big bang.

Swirls of magnetic polarization may have been detected — which are believed to be produced by periods of inflation in the early Universe tugging on light, as well as other kinds of lensing effects.

If our Universe happened to be locked in an eternal heartbeat of expansion and collapse, black holes would leave an impression. And it could look just like a number of swirls recently detected in the faint echo of light at the edge of space.

It’s hardly the smoking gun for what’s called the conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) model, especially given other things that could also explain these ‘scars’. But it’s definitely worthy of serious consideration.

Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has a reputation on par with the likes of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind. His model of a pulsating Universe with no beginning or end isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it is a contender for explaining the fate of everything.