Far out cosmology: giant primordial strings may exist (Introduction)

by David Turell , Wednesday, September 30, 2020, 21:10 (1513 days ago) @ David Turell

Long large filaments from the Big Bang long ago proposed show some evidence:

https://www.quantamagazine.org/pulsar-data-may-point-to-cosmic-strings-from-the-big-ban...

"Cosmologists think that at the beginning of the universe, all the forces of nature were, for a brief fraction of a second, unified. But as the universe expanded and cooled, this superforce condensed into its familiar parts: gravity, electromagnetism and the strong and weak forces.

"According to some calculations, the cosmos might have cooled so quickly that the fabric of space-time became fractured, creating a network of whisper-thin tubes filled by pure energy that stretch across the breadth of the observable universe.

"This is one possible origin story of cosmic strings.

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"The new data that might suggest the presence of cosmic strings comes from NANOGrav, a group of astronomers who keep a watchful eye on dozens of spinning dead stars called pulsars.

"Pulsars beam out radio waves from their poles, so that from Earth we see regular flashes each time the beams sweep by our line of sight, like the flashes of a lighthouse. In fact, pulsar blips seem so unnaturally regular that on their discovery in 1967 the first pulsar was named LGM-1 for “little green men.”

"Pulsars are the most precise cosmic timekeepers. So when their blips are distorted, physicists know something is up. In particular, the researchers look for distortions caused by gravitational waves — ripples in space-time that, when they pass through the pulsars, change the blips’ arrival time on Earth. These gravitational waves could come from the thrumming of cosmic strings, collisions of supermassive black holes, or other violent cosmic processes.

***

"The paper is still being peer-reviewed, but the researchers found that something was distorting the blips emitted by all of the pulsars in the same way, and with frequencies that are expected of gravitational waves. It remains possible that this pattern is instead coming from some unknown, common source of noise in the pulsars, or in the clocks that measure the blips’ arrival on Earth."

Comment: Tantalizing findings, not related to the tiny string theory. The universe still contains some amazing secrets. God, as architect, continues to confuse us.