A GRAND COSMIC TOUR

DARK ENERGY AND DARK MATTER

FROM THE FIRST SECOND
TO THE END OF TIME

ESSENTIAL A REVOLUTION IN COSMOLOGY

BLACK HOLE SECRETS

GUIDE№24 AND MORE

OUR
INCREDIBLE
UNIVERSE
THE QUEST FOR AN ULTIMATE
UNDERSTANDING OF THE COSMOS

EDITED BY

MICHAEL BROOKS
NEW
SCIENTIST
ESSENTIAL
A
s the great Douglas Adams once wrote,
space is big – “vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly
big”. But what Adams didn’t say is that its
contents are also vast, huge and mind-

GUIDE boggling in their own right. From chains

of galaxies billions of light years long to black holes
billions of times more massive than the sun, our

OUR universe is a place of grandeur and spectacle.

Yet despite the almost immeasurable difference
from the human scale, we have still managed to
get to grips with the cosmos and all it contains.

INCREDIBLE Thanks to the ingenuity of scientists, engineers

and mathematicians, we now have a diverse array
of telescopes, spacecraft and other instruments,
which have revealed secrets that people from previous
UNIVERSE generations could only have dreamed of learning.
We know the universe’s age, its history and
the scope of its contents – as well as the nature
of the stage on which its dramas play out. We can
even appreciate what it is that we don’t yet know
for sure. This is surely a golden age of cosmology,
the perfect time to take a moment to appreciate
the incredible universe beyond our skies.
All titles in the Essential Guide series can be
bought by visiting shop.newscientist.com; feedback
is welcome at [email protected].
Michael Brooks

NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDES SERIES EDITOR Thomas Lewton ABOUT THE EDITOR
NORTHCLIFFE HOUSE, 2 DERRY STREET,
EDITOR Michael Brooks Michael Brooks is a physics consultant to New Scientist who holds
LONDON, W8 5TT
+44 (0)203 615 6500 DESIGN Craig Mackie a PhD in quantum physics.
© 2024 NEW SCIENTIST LTD, ENGLAND SUBEDITOR Tom Leslie
NEW SCIENTIST ESSENTIAL GUIDES
PRODUCTION AND APP Carl Latter
ARE PUBLISHED BY NEW SCIENTIST LTD
ISSN 2634-0151 TECHNICAL DEVELOPMENT (APP) ADDITIONAL CONTRIBUTORS
PRINTED IN THE UK BY Amardeep Sian María Arias, Martin Bauer, Abigail Beall, Michael Brooks, Sean Carroll,
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1 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

CHAPTER 1 CHAPTER 2 CHAPTER 3

EVERYTHING, THE THE

EVERYWHERE FIRST DARK
SECOND SIDE

Inevitably, thanks to the vastness of Why is there something rather than Astronomical observations and
space and the complexity of its contents, nothing? Astronomical measurements cosmological considerations suggest
our understanding of the cosmos is still show that far-off galaxies are receding that there is a lot of stuff missing from
in its infancy. Yet thanks to powerful from us, suggesting a beginning to our inventory of the universe. Around
telescopes and some inspired theorising, it all – the moment we now know 85 per cent of the universe’s matter
there is already much we can discern as the big bang. is exotic stuff that doesn’t reflect,
about how the universe works and emit or absorb light. It is known as
what it contains. p24 Wind back the clock “dark matter”. Combined the puzzling
p29 The cosmic microwave background observation of “dark energy” these
p6 What is space-time? p30 Quantum explosion make up the dark universe.
p8 The grandest tour p32 Beyond first light
p16 A cosmic spectacular p38 Mysterious gravitational glue
p21 How big is the universe? p41 The axion option
p43 What is dark energy?
p47 Going deeper

2 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

CHAPTER 4 CHAPTER 5 CHAPTER 6

THE MASTERS THE

SEEDS OF OF THE CRAZIEST
REVOLUTION UNIVERSE QUESTIONS
IN THE
UNIVERSE
A suite of new telescopes, including Albert Einstein once dismissed For all the knowledge they have gained,
the James Webb Space Telescope, them as purely theoretical objects. cosmologists are aware of just how
offer a novel perspective on the cosmos, Now, though, we know that black holes much there is still to learn about our
while the thrilling new capabilities in do exist, swallowing everything in their universe. That is why they aren’t afraid
magnetic field and gravitational wave cosmic neighbourhood. Cosmologists to ask the most deranged, difficult and
detection may expose a rich seam of are also finding that they may play dangerous questions in their attempts
cosmic events that went previously many vital roles in their theories of the to get to the bottom of life, the universe
unnoticed. We thought we were living universe – and that by studying them we and everything.
through cosmology’s “golden age”. may glimpse of a final theory of physics.
It seems, however, that the best may p82 Rethinking reality
be still to come. p66 Keys to the cosmos p87 Are space and time illusions?
p70 The black hole next door p88 Is the universe a self-learning AI?
p52 Seeing further with JWST p73 Cosmic memories p90 Is the universe fine-tuned for life?
p55 View to a thrill p76 The ancient ones p95 Is the cosmos conscious?
p56 Balancing act
p59 Magnetic cosmos
p61 Wave hello

New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe | 3

CHAPTER 1

4 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

The furthest any human has made it from Earth is just beyond
the moon – some 400,000 kilometres away, or just 1.3 seconds
at light speed. The edge of the observable universe lies
46.5 billion light years away.

Inevitably, due to the vastness of space and the complexity

of its contents, our understanding of the cosmos is still in its
infancy. Yet thanks to powerful telescopes and some inspired
theorising, there is already much we can discern about how
the universe works and what it contains.

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 5

 ESSAY

WHAT IS
SPACE-TIME?
To grasp the basics, we must first understand the strange stuff
the universe is made of. Cosmologist Sean Carroll introduces
Albert Einstein’s greatest insight: space-time.

OU will no doubt have heard of that different observers will generally divide
space-time. It is, after all, a staple of space-time into “space” and “time” in different,
science fiction, and part of the everyday incompatible ways; what is “space” and what is
language of science. It is also part of life, “time” are relative to how an observer is moving.
when you stop to think about it. If you Various thinkers had previously speculated
want to meet a friend for coffee, you have that the two should be rolled together. In Edgar
to tell them where you are going to be – Allan Poe’s 1848 prose poem Eureka, for instance,
your location in space – but you also he wrote that “space and duration are one”. But it
need to let them know when you will wasn’t until 1908 that mathematician Hermann
be there. Both bits of information are Minkowski unified them in a scientific way. He
necessary because we live in a four-dimensional dramatically proclaimed: “Henceforth, space for
continuum: three-dimensional space and everything itself, and time for itself, shall completely reduce
within it, from steaming coffee machines to stars to a mere shadow, and only some sort of union
exploding in faraway galaxies, all happening at of the two shall preserve independence.”
different moments of one-dimensional time. Einstein was unimpressed, grumbling about
“Space-time” is simply the physical universe “superfluous learnedness”. But he eventually came
inside which we and everything else exist. And around to the idea, putting the geometry of space-time
yet, even after millennia living in it, we still don’t firmly at the heart of his general relativity. It said that
know what space-time actually is. Physicists have space-time isn’t merely a static background in which
strived to work it out for more than a century. things happen. It is a dynamic entity, warping and
Space-time is a relatively new notion. Isaac Newton stretching under the influence of mass and energy.
BEHOLDINGEYE/ISTOCK

had no need for it. For him, space and time were The curvature of space-time manifests itself to us as
individually real and absolute. Only when Albert the force of gravity, the engine that drives the motion
Einstein formulated his special theory of relativity of the stars, planets and all the other contents of
in 1905 did the two start to come together. He showed the cosmos – the grandest menagerie of all. ❚

6 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

PROFILE
SEAN
CARROLL
Sean Carroll is the
Homewood Professor
of Natural Philosophy at
Johns Hopkins University,
Maryland, and a member
of the Fractal Faculty at
the Santa Fe Institute in
New Mexico. His research
covers physics and
philosophy, including
foundational questions
in quantum mechanics,
space-time, complexity
and cosmology.

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 7

THE GRANDEST TOUR
From exoplanets through to supermassive black holes and the great cosmic
web, the contents of the universe combine to form a marvellous menagerie.

EXOPLANETS

L
ET’S start close to home – conceptually speaking. so far. This may be due to bias caused by the way we
Given the vastness of the universe and the detect exoplanets, or it could be that our own solar
number of stars it contains, it would take a system is unusual compared with others in our galaxy.
peculiarly blinkered view to believe that our solar But in the search for alien life, these are exciting
system, with its ordered retinue of eight planets, planets, especially those that orbit in the “habitable
is the only such collection of worlds in our galaxy. Only zone”, at a distance from their star that would allow
in the past three decades, however, have our telescopes liquid water to exist on the surface. A particularly
been able to see planets orbiting other stars, known as promising location is the TRAPPIST-1 system, which
exoplanets. We have now discovered more than 5000 has seven rocky planets orbiting the same star.
of them, and most don’t look anything like Earth.
NEPTUNE-LIKE
HOT JUPITERS These are around the same size as Neptune
The surprises with exoplanets started in 1995 with and Uranus, with similar hydrogen and helium
51 Pegasi b, the first planet to be discovered orbiting a atmospheres and rocky cores. So far, we have
main sequence star, the most common type of star in discovered over 1700 of them. And in 2017,
the galaxy, other than the sun. At about half the mass of astronomers detected water vapour in the
Jupiter, but orbiting closer to its star than Mercury does atmosphere of one called HAT-P-11b.
to our sun, it was the first so-called hot Jupiter – a gas
giant that orbits scorchingly close to its host star. SUPER-EARTHS
We have since found over 1500 hot Jupiters, and Of the exoplanets that have been discovered,
the consensus is that these planets have migrated in only a handful are rocky planets like Earth or Mars.
towards their star after forming in a more distant orbit. Just under a third are gas giants, like Jupiter and Saturn,
But while this is a large proportion of the 5000-odd and just over a third are Neptune-like. The rest are
exoplanets found so far, we shouldn’t overestimate mostly super-Earths, planets that are unlike any
how common they are. Most exoplanet detections in our solar system. These are between twice and
happen by looking at how a star’s light dips or changes 10 times the mass of Earth. Some are made of gas,
colour as a planet passes in front of it, which biases some are rock and some are formed of a mix of both.
discoveries towards large, fast-orbiting planets that
transit across the face of their star more often. ROGUE PLANETS
Hot Jupiter planets are actually relatively rare. Some planets exist entirely without stars. These
lonesome objects are often called sub-brown dwarfs
ROCKY PLANETS because they are thought to have emerged from the
That said, we have found far fewer rocky exoplanets, collapse of clouds of dust and gas in a similar way
most of which are less than twice the mass of Earth, to the formation of stars and brown dwarfs – but
compared with any other kind: just a few hundred they were too small for any fusion to occur.

8 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 One of the handful we know about, WISE 0855-0714,
sits by itself in space just over 7 light years away from
STARS, NEUTRON STARS
Earth. Its mass is estimated to be between three and
10 times that of Jupiter, water ice has been found in
AND BLACK HOLES

P
its atmosphere and its temperatures can reach as LANETS are made after stars form, when a
low as -48°C. That is the coldest atmosphere we have ring of dust is left around them. This dust
detected outside of our solar system, perhaps giving slowly collects together in clumps, which
us insights into what the atmospheres of other pull more dust into them. Some break apart,
similarly cold planets look like. while others stick together. Eventually,
enough clump together to form something called a
SPACE ROCKS planetesimal. Far away from the star, these can freeze
In our solar system, the processes of planet formation and form icy planetary cores that can draw gases in
left quite a few offcuts. These cluster in two known by slowing them down. Closer towards the star, there
regions and one hypothetical place. The known isn’t much gas left over, and so rocky planets form.
regions are the asteroid belt between the orbits of Stars, then, are an essential part of what makes our
Mars and Jupiter, whose 20,000-odd rocky bodies universe habitable for life like ours, and not only because
range from just a few metres across to the dwarf of their dusty debris. These nuclear fusion reactors
planet Ceres, which is almost 950 kilometres in created the elements that make up our bodies and
diameter; and the Kuiper belt beyond Neptune, the planet we live on, and one produces the heat and
whose most famous resident is the dwarf planet Pluto, light that life on Earth needs to survive. But to fixate
which is some 2400 kilometres across. There is also a on just our own sun would be to deny the magnificent
small group of co-orbital asteroids, which share their diversity of stars in all their stages of birth, life and death.
orbits with planets. One even shares Jupiter’s orbit After all, there are plenty of them out there. In the
despite going the opposite way around the sun. Milky Way alone, there are an estimated 100 billion
The hypothetical home of space rocks is the Oort stars, and beyond our own galaxy there are billions
cloud, a spherical cloud of icy rocks encircling the of other galaxies. This means there are thought to
solar system, whose existence is hypothesised as a be around 200 billion trillion stars in the universe.
source for the long-period comets that sometimes Not all stars shine equally brightly or are the same
swing by the sun on their highly elliptical orbits. colour. In fact, they are classified by the relationship
A suspicion that similar regions exist in other star between their temperature – which creates their
systems has been increased by the identification in colour – and the amount of light they give out. Hotter
recent years of two interloping bodies from outside the stars shine bluer, while cooler stars shine redder. Across
solar system, ‘Oumuamua and the comet 2I/Borisov. this spectrum, however, stars have a huge range of
There are hints that a further 17 such interlopers brightness, from one ten-thousandth of the sun’s
may reside in our cosmic neighbourhood. ❚ luminosity to a million times brighter than it. >

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 9

 YOU ARE HERE
This map shows the circle of the cosmos that surrounds us,
extending to a distance of 200 million light years. At this
scale, space is comprised of clusters of galaxies and voids,
the latter being areas with relatively few galaxies. The Milky
Way, at the centre, is part of the Local Group of galaxies, with
NGC
the Virgo cluster our nearest neighbour.
6769
NGC
6753
KEY
Pegasus
Clusters of galaxies = White
cluster
Voids = Yellow
Pavo
cluster

MAJESTIC SPIRAL
The Milky Way’s spiral structure is dominated by
two main arms called Scutum-Centaurus and Perseus. 270˚
It also features a dense region known as the central bar. Eridanus void
Our solar system lies on a more modest structure
called the Orion spur.

Galactic longitude
0˚

75,000 ly
30˚ 330˚

60,000 ly Fornax
S cluster
CU
TU

NORM
M-C

AA
45,000 ly
ENTA
RM

URUS ARM

60˚ RM rm 300˚
S A pc a
U
3k
ARI
Far
SAGITT

rm
ca
kp

r3
Nea
CENTRAL BAR
Taurus void
O UTE

90˚ Sun 270˚

O RI

RS
PE

NS
RA

EU PUR
SA
RM

RM

15,000 ly

120˚ 240˚
RICAHRD POWELL/NASA

30,000 ly
150˚ 210˚
180˚

10 | New Scientist
10 | NewEssential
Scientist Essential Guide
Guide | Our | Time Universe
Incredible
Cygnus 100 million light years
void

2,000,000,000,000
Upper estimate for the number
Delphinus void
of galaxies in the universe

NGC
5419

180˚

Local void
A3565

Virgo
cluster

90˚
Ursa Centaurus
Major cluster

Corvus void

Eridanus

0˚

Leo void
Antlia
cluster

Hydra
Puppis cluster
cluster

Gemini void

Cancer
cluster

>

Chapter
Chapter 1 | The basics
1 | Everything, of time | 11 | 11
everywhere
 The biggest factor in a star’s luminosity is its mass, Stars evolve with time, and astronomers can trace that evolution
which depends on the amount of material present by plotting the temperature of any given star against the amount
when it formed. Astronomers plot luminosity against of light it gives out, known as luminosity
temperature on a Hertzsprung-Russell diagram (right),
with a star’s position depending on its life stage. Stars 100K Canopus
LUMINOSITY (SUN=1)
Rigel Giants and
in the prime of life, during which time they are burning supergiants
by fusing hydrogen nuclei into helium, are called main Bellatrix
sequence stars and fall on a diagonal line from massive, 3K
Achernar Polaris
Spica
hot blue stars to small, cool red ones. The very smallest
and coolest main sequence stars are red dwarfs, Main sequence
Albireo
with masses less than a tenth that of our sun. 100
Beta Eridani
Once a star begins to exhaust its primary hydrogen
fuel, it starts to fuse heavier elements in its core, Fomalhaut
while still fusing hydrogen into helium in its outer 3
regions. This causes the star to expand, leaving the Sun
main sequence. What happens next depends on
how large it was to begin with. When the Danish 0.1

astronomer Ejnar Hertzsprung started categorising

stars, he realised they fell into two separate categories: Red dwarfs
Sirius B White dwarfs
main sequence stars and other, distinctly larger stars, 0.003
BPM 37093
which he called giants. A few years later, an even TEMP (K)
larger category appeared, and was given the name 30,000 25,000 20,000 15,000 10,000 5000
supergiants. A few stars under a fourth category of
hypergiant have been identified, including UY Scuti,
which may be up to 1700 times larger than our sun.
Sometimes stars come in pairs: a binary system,
where two stars are gravitationally bound to, and in
orbit around, one another. The star system 55 Cancri,
found 41 light years from Earth in the constellation
Cancer, is one example. The fifth planet in this system
is twice the size of Earth, and made of diamond.
After a giant star has run out of hydrogen to burn,
it begins to fuse helium to make carbon and oxygen.
As these elements begin to build up, for most stars, the
core temperature isn’t high enough to take fusion any
further and so it stops. At this point, the gravitational
pull inwards is no longer balanced by an outward
pressure from the nuclear reactions in the core, and the
star implodes to become a white dwarf. These remnants

12 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

of dead stars are dim and dense, with hundreds of observed in our galaxy, but astronomers believe
thousands of Earth masses packed into the volume hundreds of millions exist in the Milky Way alone.
of our planet. They only shine thanks to leftover heat. We can’t see them directly: their gravitational pull is
The very largest supergiant stars don’t become dim so strong nothing, not even light, can escape. Instead,
white dwarfs. Their core temperatures are sufficient we infer their presence from watching how nearby
to fuse nuclei right up to iron, and they end their lives stars and galaxies move, and by signals produced
in dramatic explosions – called supernovae – to leave by their collisions, called gravitational waves.
behind black holes or neutron stars. The existence of black holes was predicted by
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity as entities
→- whose immense gravity would cause space-time to
More on black holes in Chapter 5- curve infinitely, creating what became known as a
singularity. But here, general relativity breaks down:
At the heart of the Crab nebula, for example, the solutions to the equations go to infinity. Many
sits a relatively young neutron star, left over from physicists believe these singularities don’t describe
a supernova that was seen from Earth in AD 1054. what is happening inside real black holes, and instead
At the time, Chinese astronomers noted it as a “guest are a sign that we need to amend our theories.
star” near the constellation Taurus that became four Most galaxies are believed to host a black hole
times as bright as Venus in the sky, before disappearing. millions of times the mass of the sun at their centre.
Astronomers realised in 1939 that this supernova must These supermassive black holes are thought to be
have been where the Crab nebula is and began hunting created by the merger of smaller astrophysical black
for the star. In 1968, when astronomers finally found holes. But we have spotted some in the early universe,
the neutron star, called the Crab pulsar, it was the when it was just 700 million years old. This is a problem
first known supernova remnant. because, according to our models, supermassive black
We know of around 2000 neutron stars, collapsed holes shouldn’t have been able to form so fast.
remnants of supergiant stars that aren’t quite large Mostly, we infer the presence of supermassive
enough to form black holes. The heaviest neutron black holes from the gravitational effects on their
star is 2.1 times the mass of the sun. They are the surroundings. In 2019, however, astronomers at the
densest stars ever seen, with the mass of our sun Event Horizon Telescope released the first ever picture
packed into a sphere around 10 kilometres across. of a black hole, the one at the centre of the M87 galaxy.
Some neutron stars spin incredibly fast on their In May 2022, the same group released a picture of
axis, with a jet of intense radio emissions whirling Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the centre of the Milky
round with them like the beam from a lighthouse. Way. This is 4 million times the mass of the sun.
These are called pulsars, and were discovered by At first, its presence was inferred by studies of the
astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell in 1967. way stars in the centre of the galaxy move. One star
Much more massive stars can end up as astrophysical in particular, called S2, was observed for 27 years,
black holes, which are created when a huge star runs and these observations were used to prove that Isaac
out of fuel in its core. If the core is above three solar Newton’s laws of gravity couldn’t describe its motion,
masses, the star collapses to form a black hole. Only but Einstein’s general relativity could. The first ever
around a couple of dozen such black holes have been picture of it showed that relativity was right. ❚ >

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 13

INTERSTELLAR SPACE

B
EFORE we get to the scale of galaxies, it is The vast majority of the 300 million or so
worth noting that the vast space between galaxies we have observed have been looked at
stars within a galaxy isn’t totally empty, using ground-based telescopes, and they appear
even though parts of it are the closest thing mainly as unresolved blobs. Where we can make
to a vacuum that we know of in the universe. out some detail, we see that around 60 per cent take
In the interstellar medium, there is an average of on the distinctive form of a spiral galaxy: a flat disc of
one atom in every cubic centimetre of space, a tiny stars made up of a central bulge surrounded by arms
fraction of the 90 million trillion atoms found in arranged in a spiral shape. In normal spiral galaxies,
the same volume of air at ground level on Earth. these arms extend directly from the galaxy’s core;
Most of the atoms in the interstellar medium – barred spirals, meanwhile, have a central bar and
about 99 per cent – are hydrogen atoms from dying the spiral arms stretch out from its ends. Spiral
stars. But over the past decade or so, we have spotted arms only form in galaxies that are disc-shaped,
an ever-growing menagerie of other atoms and but exactly why some galaxies are spirals and
molecules, including helium hydride, one of the some aren’t isn’t fully understood. Some form
first molecules predicted to form in the universe arms because of a nearby source of gravity, but
from reactions between hydrogen ions and neutral not all spiral galaxies have such a mass nearby.
helium atoms, and argonium, formed of hydrogen It is thought that spiral galaxies eventually evolve
and the normally unreactive noble gas argon. into elliptical galaxies. About a third of all the galaxies
One striking fact is that the interstellar medium we have seen are classified as elliptical. These usually
is everywhere, indicating that galaxies don’t form form when spiral galaxies merge together, so their
new stars at a high enough rate to deplete its diffuse shape can vary depending on the ways they merge and
contents. Studying processes within the interstellar collide – some look almost circular, while others are
medium can therefore help us understand how much more elongated. The stars in elliptical galaxies
stars form – and how they don’t. ❚ tend to be older than in spirals because of this.
Galaxies that don’t have a clear spiral or elliptical
structure are called irregular galaxies. Most of these

GALAXIES, SUPERCLUSTERS are dwarf galaxies, small galaxies composed of a few

billion stars, and they are more easily pulled apart by

AND THE COSMIC WEB external gravitational forces. However, some regular-
sized galaxies are irregular in shape, too, which is

I
T’S time to zoom out to look at the cosmos on the usually as a result of collisions with other galaxies.
scale of a galaxy. Every star we see in the night sky Some dwarf galaxies are held within the gravitational
is part of just one galaxy – our own Milky Way. Up field of a nearby, larger galaxy. The Milky Way has
until around 100 years ago, astronomers believed 14 confirmed satellite galaxies, including the Large
this was all there is. Now we know the Milky Way Magellanic Cloud, the Small Magellanic Cloud and the
is just one of billions of galaxies in the universe, if Sagittarius dwarf galaxy. The last of these is thought to
not more: NASA estimates there could be 2 trillion. have collided with the Milky Way at least three times
Galaxies start off as clouds of gas, stars and in its history, and one of these events may even have
dust with little structure. They begin to form into triggered the formation of our solar system.
coherent arrangements as they clash and merge Galaxies don’t exist in isolation. Taking a more
with other galaxies, all of which is driven by the expansive view reveals the overall structure of stuff
pull of gravity from other matter and black holes. in the universe – providing clues as to its origin and

14 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 evolution. If you could zoom out of the Milky Way,
you would start to see the Local Group – a collection
of at least 80 galaxies set in the shape of a dumbbell.
At one end is the Milky Way and its satellites, and at
the other is our closest large neighbour, Andromeda.
Zoom out a bit further, and you would see
that the Local Group is next door to a collection
of thousands of galaxies called the Virgo cluster.
That cluster and the Local Group are both, in turn,
part of a much larger structure that is more than
100 million light years across and contains another
100 groups of galaxies, called the Virgo supercluster.
Astronomers believe there to be some 10 million
such superclusters in the observable universe.
And yet a study in 2014 indicated that the Virgo
supercluster is part of an even bigger supercluster
MARK GARLICK / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY

called Laniakea, showing that the universe is ordered

on a much larger scale than we originally thought.
The structure of the universe doesn’t stop
at superclusters. Zooming out from the Virgo
supercluster, you would see the Pisces-Cetus
supercluster complex. This is a galaxy filament,
or a vast thread of superclusters. At its largest scales,
the universe is made up of these filaments, which
spread out like a web with voids of space in-between.
Illustration of the Laniakea The cosmic web is the largest known structure
supercluster (yellow), which in the universe, and we observed it directly for
includes our Milky Way the first time in 2019. Its formation is thought to
have been governed by strings of dark matter that
attracted normal matter, in the form of superclusters,
to congregate along the filaments. The voids
in between contain few or no galaxies and can
stretch for distances of 30 to 300 million light years.
While filaments in the cosmic web are the biggest
structures in the universe, they can be broken down
into smaller galaxy clusters and galaxies. The biggest
individual objects in the universe are huge clouds
of gas, some of which are more than 400,000 light
years across. Called Lyman-alpha blobs after a
spectral line of hydrogen seen in the light they
emit, the process that makes these huge clumps
of hydrogen gas is a mystery. ❚

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 15

ESSAY

A COSMIC
SPECTACULAR
Having seen a snapshot of the universe at O HUMAN eyes, the night sky is
serene, save for the moon and a few
scales all the way up to its biggest structures, wandering planets. Peer into space with
it’s now time for a dynamic view. Events beyond a telescope that can scan the entire sky
in days, however, and it appears as a
Earth’s skies offer a magnificent show – if you great cosmic fireworks display – a riot
know where and how to look. Let astronomer of bangs and flashes radiating across
the electromagnetic spectrum, from
María Arias be your guide. radio waves to gamma rays.
Let’s start with something relatively
familiar: a stellar flare such as our sun’s solar flares –
the source of the spectacular northern lights. A stellar
flare is an explosion in the atmosphere of a star that
results in an intense flash of radiation across the
electromagnetic spectrum. When our sun flares,
we see a sudden burst of brightness before it quickly
returns to quiescence. Something similar goes on in
stars of various sizes, temperatures and luminosities.
We know a fair bit about what causes this in our sun.
PROFILE It comes down to its magnetic field, which is carried
MARÍA by the roiling gases that make up every star. These
ARIAS gases are in constant motion due to convection in the
outer layers of the sun and our star’s rotation, so the
magnetic field lines are constantly being stretched and
María Arias is an tangled. When the lines come into contact, they merge,
astronomer at the releasing huge amounts of energy. At the sun’s surface,
Leiden Observatory this quickly heats the surrounding atmosphere and
in the Netherlands who accelerates particles, resulting in sudden outbursts.
studies the remnants Sometimes the excess energy can cause some
of the material of the sun to bubble up in a coronal
of exploded stars.
mass ejection. In extreme cases, these reach Earth and
interact with its magnetic field, which can endanger
satellites and even our ground-based infrastructure.

16 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 while the other is still actively fusing elements in its
core. If the two are close enough, the white dwarf’s
gravitational field can suck matter away from its
companion’s surface, which gets deposited on the
white dwarf. Typically hydrogen gas, this material
heats up as it amasses until the temperature gets so
high that nuclear fusion reactions ignite, releasing
all their energy at once. The result is a brief surge
in luminosity, where the white dwarf becomes
tens of thousands of times as bright as our sun.
And it doesn’t have to be a one-off. We think
NICOLE REINDL, UNIVERSITY OF POTSDAM

that once all the hydrogen is used up, the cycle starts
again, leading to recurrent novae. We observe these
rarely – in 2021, for instance, we spotted one called
RS Ophiuchi, having already seen it erupt in 2006
and 1985. But we think that many novae recur,
albeit typically on much longer timescales.
Sometimes, the novae become supersized,
creating supernovae: a runaway fusion reaction.
As with classical novae, the sources of these explosions,
Artist’s impression often referred to as type Ia supernovae, are white
of a merger between dwarfs in binary systems. Here, however, as the white
two white dwarf stars dwarf accumulates matter from its companion, its
mass increases to the point where degeneracy pressure
That is why astronomers are constantly monitoring can no longer resist gravity. This limit is 1.4 times the
the sun’s activity to warn of incoming solar storms. mass of our sun and is known as the Chandrasekhar
We are also keen to see flares on other stars, partly limit, after the physicist who calculated it.
so we can see the consequences for any planets orbiting But before the star collapses in on itself, the
them, which would have huge implications for their temperature in its core gets high enough that the
habitability. One idea is that stellar flares can expose carbon it contains can finally ignite into nuclear fusion
nascent life on nearby worlds to fatal levels of radiation. reactions. This sparks a thermonuclear runaway: the
But recent research into an exoplanet called Proxima b energy produced further increases the temperature,
suggests that flares can actually make conditions more which increases the reaction rate of carbon fusion and
conducive to life, by changing the atmosphere such that so on. Blowing up from its core, the star is obliterated in
it can retain heat where otherwise it would be too cold. an explosion about 5 billion times brighter than the sun.
Stellar flares aren’t the only source of radiation from The fact that only white dwarfs close to the
stars. We can also see classical novae: bright outbursts Chandrasekhar limit can explode in this way makes
from white dwarfs – the exposed, inert cores that remain them more or less uniformly bright. This is why we
after low-mass stars (ones of eight solar masses or less) call them “standard candles”: if we see one, we know
blow out their outer layers at the end of their lives. how far away it is from how bright it appears. We have
Having run through their nuclear fuel, and used them to measure the expansion of the universe,
unable to ignite fusion reactions in the carbon and and to discover that it is expanding at an accelerating
oxygen that remains, these cores cool and dim as rate, which cosmologists explain by invoking a
they radiate away heat from a lifetime of nuclear mysterious entity called dark energy.
reactions. Their electrons are so tightly packed
that they exert a quantum mechanical pressure →-
known as degeneracy pressure, which prevents More on dark energy in Chapter 3-
the white dwarfs from collapsing in on themselves
due to gravity. If a white dwarf is alone, then it will But standard candles may not be quite as standard as
limp on, slowly cooling and dimming. If it has a they first appear. We have found that their brightness
companion, however, things can get explosive. can vary depending on the progenitor system, as well
In binary systems, where two stars orbit a common as what kind of galaxy they are located in. That matters
centre of mass, one star reaches the white dwarf stage because even tiny inaccuracies in our measurements >

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 17

 JASON PUN (NOAO)/SINS COLLABORATION
of cosmic expansion would have big implications
for what dark energy might be.
The show doesn’t stop there. Core-collapse
supernovae are, essentially, the collapse and rebound
of a massive star: roughly as bright and energetic
as type Ia supernovae, but very different beasts.
Core-collapse supernovae are explosions from
the very biggest stars – those of eight solar masses
and above – which don’t become white dwarfs. The
temperatures in their cores are so high that they can SN1987A, a core-collapse
fuse increasingly heavy elements until they form iron, supernova, as seen by the
which cannot be combined with any other element Hubble Space Telescope
to release energy. During the star’s life, the nuclear
reactions in its core provide enough outward pressure
to counteract the mass of its layers. But once the core exotic form of matter held together by the degeneracy
runs out of fuel, it can no longer support the mass of the pressure imparted by neutrons. When two neutron stars
layers surrounding it, and the star collapses in on itself. orbit a common centre of mass, the system releases
The collapse becomes an explosion because energy in the form of ripples in space-time called
all this material changes direction. We don’t quite gravitational waves. Eventually, the two neutron stars
understand how that happens, but the idea is that collide and we see a powerful flash in the optical, infrared
the gas in the core becomes so compact that it can and gamma parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
compress no more, so that material falling inward A lot of what we know about these kilonovae
from the outer layers bounces off it to create a shock comes from a gravitational wave detection known as
wave. Matter then bursts out from the star at more than GW170817. When it was spotted in 2017, facilities that
10,000 kilometres a second, releasing a huge amount together observe across the electromagnetic spectrum
of energy that triggers further nuclear reactions. This turned to look. This gave us an exquisite dataset that
is the main source of elements heavier than iron in the confirmed some long-held hypotheses regarding
universe, which enrich the interstellar medium and kilonovae. Firstly, it supported the idea that neutron
drive the evolution of the surrounding space. star mergers produce short and intense bursts of
What remains is some of the mass from the inner gamma rays. Secondly, it demonstrated that these
layers of the star, which forms either an extremely mergers are the site of a kind of element formation in
dense ball of neutrons – a neutron star – or a black hole. which neutrons are absorbed into an atomic nucleus,
These are the most exotic forms of matter in the producing heavy metals like platinum and gold.
universe, where the laws of general relativity (Albert The remnant left behind after the merger is either
Einstein’s theory of gravity) and quantum mechanics a black hole or a larger neutron star. The details of the
(governing the subatomic world) collide. Hence, they merger are anyone’s guess, though, because we don’t
lie beyond our current grasp of physics. have a good grasp of how pressure, density, temperature
Then there’s the kilonovae. Named for the fact and composition are related in a gas of neutrons that are
that these bursts are roughly 1000 times brighter than compressed to the point where they can be packed no
a classical nova, kilonovae are produced in a different tighter. This “equation of state” in neutron stars remains
way to novae and supernovae. one of the biggest open questions in astrophysics.
Neutron stars, themselves the extremely dense Not every cosmic disturbance is the result of an
remnants of some core-collapse supernovae, are an explosion. First spotted in archival data in 2007, fast

18 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

ESO/WFI/MPIFR/APEX/A.WEISS ET AL/NASA/CXC/CFA/R.KRAFT ET AL.

very distant galaxies, the information they encode could

tell us about the vast voids between galaxies. That might
include insights about the strength of the magnetic
fields there and whether they were present in the early
universe, which would force cosmologists to rethink
the role of magnetism in the evolution of the cosmos.
The brightest flashes in the universe come from
gamma-ray bursts (GRBs). Gamma-rays are the highest
energy form of light there is, and GRBs, the brightest
The active and most energetic transient events we have ever seen,
galactic nucleus can last from milliseconds to minutes, though they
in Centaurus A often show an afterglow in X-ray, optical and radio
emissions, which has allowed astronomers to
investigate the sources that produce them.
radio bursts (FRBs) are incredibly powerful millisecond- We have discovered that there are two distinct
duration pulses of radio waves from distant galaxies. populations. Long GRBs, which have a duration of
Initially, they had astronomers scratching their heads: more than 2 seconds and up to a minute, are thought to
what kind of event could possibly release as much be produced by core-collapse supernovae. The collapse
energy in a fraction of a second as the sun will forms a black hole, whipping up the star’s remnants
radiate in 100,000 years? into powerful jets. Short GRBs, those of less than
We spotted a second burst in 2012, and since 2 seconds, meanwhile, are associated with the merger
then the catalogue of FRBs has itself exploded, of compact objects like neutron stars and black holes.
with more than 1000 sightings confirmed as of 2024. This was confirmed in 2017 when the gravitational
As a result, our understanding of them has come wave signal GW170817 was attributed to the collision
on in leaps and bounds. of two neutron stars, and follow-up observations
FRBs are so short-lived and intensely bright revealed that, in these circumstances, a short
that the objects producing them must be incredibly GRB is produced alongside a kilonova.
compact. We also know that the radio emission is Gamma ray bursts continue to serve up surprises,
polarised, which implies the source must have a very though. In 2022, astronomers spotted the most
strong magnetic field. But the key piece of the puzzle powerful long GRB we have ever seen and dubbed
was the discovery of “repeaters”, where more than one it “the BOAT” – the brightest of all time – on the
burst is observed from the same source. This tells us basis that it is probably the brightest signal to
that whatever produces FRBs isn’t always destroyed in hit Earth since human civilisation began.
the process. All of which has led to the widely held idea Observations of the afterglow suggest that it may
that FRBs are outbursts from strongly magnetised not have come from a supernova, as we would expect,
young neutron stars called magnetars. because it wasn’t clear whether there was even one
Astronomers have also been figuring out how to in the vicinity at all. This year, we also spotted a long
use these detections to probe distant reaches of space. GRB that seems to have come from the collision of
Each FRB pulse arrives at Earth at a broad band of radio two stars, throwing our understanding of these
frequencies, and from the time delay between the high bursts further into question.
and low-frequency signals it is possible to infer some Perhaps even more dramatic – at least in terms
of the properties of the space through which they have of the players involved – are “tidal disruption events”:
passed. Since, in most cases, the sources of FRBs are in stars being torn apart by hungry black holes. These >

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 19

ESO/M. KORNMESSER

An artist’s depiction of
the path taken by fast
radio burst FRB18112

luminous flares, which tend to last a few months, supercharged jets are essentially gigantic accretion
happen when a star passes too close to a supermassive events around supermassive black holes that can
black hole – the gravitational behemoths that lie emit so much radiation, again in the form of jets, that
at the centre of every galaxy, each with a mass they outshine the entire host galaxy. When these jets
millions to billions of times that of our sun. are pointed directly at Earth, we call them blazars.
For most of us, our experience of tidal forces When they are only slightly angled toward us,
is limited to seeing the sea level at the beach rise and they are known as quasars.
fall. This happens because Earth and its moon interact AGNs produce such powerful jets because accretion
gravitationally. As you can imagine, the gravitational is one of the most efficient ways of transforming
pull of a supermassive black hole is much more gravitational potential energy into other forms of
formidable: when an unfortunate star orbits too energy, such as heat and radiation. As gas and dust
close, the tidal forces it experiences are sufficient to swirl ever closer to the supermassive black hole, their
completely rip it apart, in some cases launching jets gravitational potential energy is transformed into heat,
of hot matter and radiation that we see from Earth. which is radiated away as electromagnetic waves.
We have only seen about 125 of these events, and it What makes AGNs so dazzling, however, is that
isn’t entirely clear how the jets are generated. But the accretion can also trigger what we observe as jets
idea is that, as the star stretches and tears, some of its of radio waves. These jets can reach many times
material coalesces into a disc around the black hole – further than the outer reaches of their host galaxy.
and the black hole’s gravity, in turn, causes this material But astronomers are interested in active galactic
to spin and heat up. Thanks to the magnetic fields and nuclei primarily because they play a crucial role in the
the conservation of angular momentum, the material evolution of galaxies. As the supermassive black holes
in the disc accretes onto the black hole, producing that produce them cycle through periods of activity
bright flares. In the right conditions, jets can form. and quiescence, they produce a series of feedback
Tidal disruption events can tell us a lot about effects in the gas and dust in the host galaxy. These,
supermassive black holes, from their mass to the in turn, drive episodes of star formation, energise the
physics that produces jets. Perhaps most interestingly, interstellar medium and increase the black hole’s mass
each is a specific instance of how a black hole – all with huge consequences for the way their host
consumes matter and grows over time. In other galaxies grow. Observations of AGNs from the distant,
words, they are windows into a black hole’s diet. and therefore early, universe also provide clues to the
And finally, the most dramatic of all the mystery of how supermassive black holes form, which
transients: active galactic nuclei, or AGNs. These remains one of cosmology’s biggest mysteries. ❚

20 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

HOW BIG IS
THE UNIVERSE?
would leave the universe smaller than other models
We may never know what lies beyond predict. “In principle, the universe could be just the size
the boundaries of the observable universe, we observe, but that would be a hell of a coincidence,”
says Quintin. “It’s more likely that it’s at least a couple
but the fabric of the cosmos can tell us times that size. In theory, anything between an infinite
whether the universe is infinite or not. universe and a relatively small one is possible.”
That brings up a truly mind-boggling question:
is the universe finite or does it go on forever? In an
attempt to answer this, cosmologists look at the shape
N A sense, we are at the centre of the universe – of space-time. To wrap your mind around this idea, it
but only because we can see the same distance is simpler to think of space as being two dimensional.
in every direction, giving us a perfectly There are three possibilities: the universe could be flat
spherical observable universe. The speed like a sheet of paper or more like a sheet of rubber, bent
limit of light combined with the inexorable into either a saddle shape or a balloon. If space-time
expansion of the cosmos means that we is shaped like a balloon, it must be finite, but the
can see about 46 billion light years in every other two shapes can be either finite or infinite.
direction. What lies beyond this horizon? So far, most experiments show that the curvature
That is a mystery we may never solve. of space-time is extremely close to zero. This hints
But there are clues. Two competing effects that the universe is flat. But proof may not come for
govern the overall size of the universe: gravity and dark decades because it relies on measurements of positions
energy. All matter has mass, which causes gravitational and movements of distant galaxies taken with an
forces that pull everything towards everything else. extreme level of precision that isn’t yet possible.
To their surprise, however, cosmologists in the early It would then take a different sort of measurement,
20th century found that distant galaxies seem to be looking at the specifics of how different areas in
hurtling away from us. The mysterious force causing space-time are connected, to determine whether
this strange expansion of space was dubbed dark the cosmos is finite or not – far from an easy task.
energy, and its nature remains elusive to this day. “I don’t know if we’ll ever be able to tell whether we
“Up until the discovery of dark energy and the live in a finite or an infinite universe,” says Quintin.
acceleration of expansion, the universe was simpler,” Nailing down the size, shape and history
says cosmologist Wendy Freedman at the University of the universe is crucial for determining its fate.
of Chicago. Without dark energy, the universe would In a balloon-like universe, cosmic expansion could
be much smaller and its size easier to predict. eventually slow and reverse, ending in a “big crunch” –
Even with dark energy, the universe may only and potentially another big bang. A saddle-shaped
be slightly larger than what is observable. In March cosmos would keep expanding forever, resulting
2024, Jean-Luc Lehners, then at the Max Planck in either a “big rip” – where the expansion rends
Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany, and space-time itself – or the heat death of the universe.
Jerome Quintin at the University of Waterloo in Canada The latter is also the most likely fate of a flat universe,
published a model that suggested the period of rapid wherein everything gets further apart and more
expansion right after the big bang, called inflation, diluted, until all that is left is a hint of weak radiation
could have been even shorter than we thought. This that lingers, unchanging, for eternity. ❚

Chapter 1 | Everything, everywhere | 21

CHAPTER 2

22 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

Why is there something rather than nothing? The question
has traditionally exercised philosophers and theologians.
Scientific thought, insofar as it paid attention to such
matters, assumed the cosmos had always been there
in an eternal, unchanging state.

Then came the greatest scientific revelation of the past

century. Astronomical measurements showed that far-off
galaxies were receding from us, as if the universe were
expanding. They suggested that there was a beginning
to it all – the moment we now know as the big bang.

Chapter 2 | The first second | 23

ESSAY

WIND BACK
THE CLOCK
Over the past century, we’ve developed HROUGHOUT all of human history,
people have looked up at the night
a good handle on the story behind the sky and wondered about the universe
universe’s birth – though there is still plenty and how it came to be. In one respect,
however, we’re very different from
left to discover, as cosmologist Dan Hooper our ancestors: we more or less
explores in this journey into our cosmic past. understand what we’re looking at.
Take an image from the Hubble
Ultra Deep Field (right), for example.
We know the blotches of light on it aren’t
stars, but entire galaxies similar to our Milky Way. And
because it takes time for light to travel through space,
we aren’t seeing what these galaxies look like today,
but rather what they were like over 13 billion years
ago, a few hundred million years after the big bang.
Just over a century ago, scientists didn’t have
the faintest understanding of our universe’s distant
past, and they certainly knew nothing about its
origin. We didn’t have the tools even to conceptualise
questions about how the universe might change or
evolve. All of that changed with Albert Einstein. With
his general theory of relativity, he showed how space
isn’t static and unchanging. It can be curved; it can
warp and deform; it can expand and contract.
NASA, ESA, AND S. BECKWITH (STSCI)
AND THE HUDF TEAM In 1929, Edwin Hubble observed that the universe >

24 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

PROFILE
DAN
HOOPER
Dan Hooper is a physicist
based at the University
of Wisconsin, where
he studies cosmology
and is the director of
the Wisconsin IceCube
Particle Astrophysics
Center (WIPAC). He
is the author of At the
Edge of Time: Exploring
the mysteries of our
universe’s first seconds.

Chapter 2 | The first second | 25

“Inflation leads to the
conclusion that there are an
infinite number of universes”
is in fact changing. Every galaxy is receding from us: the Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
every two points in space are getting farther apart from The LHC accelerates protons to about 99.999997 per
each other as time advances. The universe is expanding. cent of the speed of light and collides them head-on
If the universe were smaller in the past, and we at a rate of about 600 million times every second,
know how much matter and energy it contains, we exploiting Einstein’s famous equation E = mc2 to
can deduce that its matter and energy density must convert as much of the energy released as we possibly
once have been higher. Billions of years ago, it must can into mass. This allows us to create a variety of
have been in a denser, hotter state and expanded exotic forms of matter that are very rare in our universe
into the cooler universe we see today. That is the now but were extremely common in the incredibly
basic premise of the big bang theory. hot first trillionth of a second after the big bang.
From all I’m saying here, you might now be under
→- the impression that we know a lot, and with a great
More about the CMB later in this chapter- deal of confidence, about the universe’s first small
fraction of a second. But sadly, that just isn’t true.
According to this picture, wind back to some Now, I’m going to talk about four puzzles or problems
380,000 years after the big bang and we reach a that cosmologists have discovered or revealed over
point when the universe had first cooled enough the past few decades, which all point to something
for atoms to form. It suddenly became transparent missing in our wider understanding. To solve them,
to radiation, dumping an enormous amount of light I increasingly believe we need a radical rethink of
into the cosmos that has been propagating throughout our conception of the universe’s very early history.
space ever since. Today we see this light as the cosmic The first puzzle has to do with the simple fact
microwave background, a sea of radiation cooled to that atoms exist. Everything we know from particle
2.7 degrees above absolute zero. Its existence gives us accelerators and other such experiments tells us that,
confidence that we understand the universe and its for every kind of matter that exists in the universe,
evolution from this point right up to the present day. there exists a kind of equal and opposite mirror
Going back further, to the first seconds and version, antimatter. When you create more matter,
minutes after the big bang, we encounter a time when you create an equal amount of antimatter; when
the universe was about a billion degrees, 100 times you destroy one of them, you destroy the other
as hot as the sun’s core, and functioning as a giant along with it. So whatever created the universe’s
nuclear fusion reactor. We can predict how much matter should have created an equal amount of
deuterium, tritium, helium, lithium and beryllium we antimatter. As the universe expanded and cooled in
think should have been made in this era – and again, its first fraction of a second, we calculate that matter
the predictions agree with what we observe today. and antimatter should have destroyed each other
Winding even further back, we can’t make direct almost entirely. There should be no atoms, no
observations, but we can recreate the conditions of molecules, no stars, no galaxies, no planets and no life.
the early universe using particle accelerators such as Our second puzzle has to do with matter, too, but not

26 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

the kind that consists of atoms. It is “dark” matter that those two cases, and have a universe that gets bigger
doesn’t appreciably reflect, radiate or absorb light. Since for a while and then approaches a maximum size.
the 1970s, astronomers have been measuring how fast For decades, cosmologists set out to try to measure
other galaxies’ stars are moving in their orbits, and they which of these three cases describes our universe.
have consistently found that stars in galactic outskirts And the answer turned out to be none of the above.
are moving too fast for the amount of visible material Instead of slowing down, in the past few billion years
the galaxies contain. To explain this, nearly all galaxies our universe’s expansion rate has been getting faster.
would have to be made from a small amount of visible The universe is accelerating.
material in the centre of a larger “halo” of dark matter. Within the context of Einstein’s theory, the only
way to explain this behaviour is to posit that space
→- itself contains a fixed density of “dark energy”.
Find out more about dark matter in Chapter 3 - Unlike matter and other forms of radiation, dark
energy doesn’t get diluted as space expands, so
Making some assumptions about how dark matter it plays an increasingly important role, ultimately
must work, we can create computer models to find out driving the universe to speed up its expansion rate.
how it would have impacted the universe’s evolution.
When we do that, we find near-perfect agreement with →-
the distribution of galaxies and clusters of galaxies Turn to page 43 for more about dark energy-
we see in the universe today. With dark matter, we
can explain it: without dark matter, we can’t. The fourth and final puzzle has to do with the extremely
If you had asked me a decade or so ago what early universe, maybe something like 10 to 32 seconds
dark matter consists of, I would have given you a very after the big bang. If you take the big bang theory as it
confident-sounding answer about how it was probably was envisioned in the 1960s and 1970s, it is very hard
made up of “WIMPs”, short for weakly interacting to explain why our universe is so uniform, and also
massive particles. We thought we knew how to detect what we call geometrically flat – basically, it follows
these particles, so we built impressive, super-sensitive the rules of conventional Euclidean geometry. There
detectors for them deep underground in places like is no reason why either of these things should be.
the Gran Sasso laboratory in Italy – but we still In the 1980s, physicists began to posit an
haven’t observed any dark matter particles. explanation: cosmic inflation. In its very early
Our third puzzle has to do with how fast our universe stages, our universe expanded in explosive fashion,
has been expanding over time. General relativity growing exponentially by a factor of something like
gives you basically three possibilities. You can have a 1075 in volume over a very, very brief period of time,
universe that expands for a while, reaches a maximum smoothing itself out as it did so. The best thing is that
size and then starts to contract; you can have a universe inflation made some very specific predictions about
that expands forever, but with its expansion slowing patterns of light we would observe in the cosmic
down; or you can live on the boundary between microwave background – and we have observed them. >

Chapter 2 | The first second | 27

→- unvarying speed, no matter what frame of reference
You can read more about cosmic inflation- you were in. Another was how Mercury’s orbit didn’t
later in this chapter- fit what was predicted by Newtonian physics. People
had posited that maybe there was an additional planet
One thing that I find really compelling – or exciting, out there called Vulcan that had perturbed Mercury’s
anyway – about inflation, is it takes even a very orbit, but no one had ever been able to see it.
tiny amount of space, and it rapidly turns it into A third puzzle was that no one knew how the sun got
a multitude of universes: a multiverse. Quantum its energy. Geologists had already shown us that Earth
physics says that different patches of that space will and the sun were billions of years old. Even if the mass
stop inflating at different times, essentially creating of the sun were made of some fuel like gasoline or coal,
something like our universe. But this doesn’t happen it should have run out of energy long ago. And then
just once: in fact, it happens without limit. Inflation a fourth puzzle: Newtonian physics couldn’t explain
seems to lead inevitably to the conclusion that the inner workings of atoms. It predicted they were
there should be an infinite or nearly infinite unstable and couldn’t say why particular atoms gave
number of universes in existence, some maybe off special patterns of light, what we call spectral lines.
a lot like ours, some very different. The resolution to these problems wasn’t an
That gives us a lot to ponder about the possible incremental change in Newtonian physics. It came
varieties of existence we might find throughout with a revolution ushered in by Einstein and people
the multiverse. But all these puzzles give us also a who followed his work. In 1905, Einstein introduced his
lot of reason to doubt that we understand the whole theory of relativity that explained the uniform speed
story of the first fraction of a second of the universe. of light, and would eventually explain Mercury’s orbit.
It brings to mind a question I’m fond of asking When you combined relativity with what we learned
my colleagues: what would it have been like to be a about quantum physics, we could explain the nuclear
physicist in 1904? The reason I pick 1904 is because it’s fusion that powers the sun and begin to understand
when physicists seem to have had the most confidence the inner workings of the atom. The revolution that
that they really understood the universe. Newtonian came forth in 1905 tore down Newtonian physics
physics had reigned supreme for over two centuries. and left something else, something that would
It had been applied to problem after problem, and it have been unimaginable in 1904, in its place.
just kept working. There was every reason to think Right now, as a cosmologist, I wonder if we are in
that Newtonian physics could just be applied to the 1904 of cosmology. I hope so, because that means
anything – heat, electricity, magnetism – if we in some short time down the road, we are going to have
just thought long and hard enough about it. a revolution that will be very exciting to live through.
But back then there were also a few loose ends: a few Of course, I could be wrong. But that’s what I’m hoping
problems and puzzles that hadn’t been resolved. One for, that’s what I’m excited about – and all these puzzles
was the way light seemed always to travel at the same make me think that it is at least a little more likely. ❚

28 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

WORLD HISTORY ARCHIVE / ALAMY STOCK PHOTO

The intricate structure

of the cosmic microwave
background tells us about
the early universe

THE COSMIC MICROWAVE

BACKGROUND RADIATION
This continued until a key moment was reached,
It has been called the afterglow of
380,000 years after the big bang, when the photons
creation, the echo of the big bang and could finally escape. Now, light was able to travel
unobstructed through the cosmos. We can still
the oldest light in the universe. It’s all
see the photons released at that instant today:
around us, and it is crucial to astronomy they form the universe’s oldest light, which we
call the cosmic microwave background (CMB).
and cosmology. But what is the CMB?
The CMB was discovered by accident. In 1964,
when Robert Wilson and Arno Penzias set up their
VERYTHING we observe today was now-famous horn antenna to detect radio waves
once crammed into a much smaller from early balloon satellites, the whole idea of the
space. When the universe was young, big bang was very much an open question. Even
it consisted of a speck of extremely hot, after accounting for all possible sources of noise,
dense plasma. Things were so cramped the pair heard a puzzling continuous background
that subatomic particles constantly signal coming from all directions. It was there day
scattered off each other with such and night. They eventually realised they were seeing
frequency and force that atoms couldn’t our first glimpse of the universe’s first light.
form without being immediately broken Since then, we have measured the cosmic
apart again. This primordial plasma background photons with high precision, and we
was completely opaque. Photons, or particles of continue to do so. This gives us a picture of the universe
light, simply couldn’t travel very far without being when it was 380,000 years old – a mere baby compared
absorbed or scattering off another particle. with the 13.8 billion years it is now. We see dense
As the universe kept expanding and the plasma patches that later developed into galaxies, and patterns
cooled, it became less dense and so less likely for that tell us about the relative amounts of radiation,
photons to get scattered or absorbed by other particles. matter and dark matter in the early universe. ❚

Chapter 2 | The first second | 29

 N THE 1980s, physicists Andrei Linde

QUANTUM and Alan Guth sought to make sense

of observations showing that the cosmic
microwave background (CMB) was inexplicably

EXPLOSION
uniform. They proposed that the universe
expanded exponentially in its first split second,
smoothing out its lumps and bumps.
As Linde and Guth explored the idea
further, they realised that this “inflation”
is unlikely to have happened just once
Cosmological observations of the cosmic and stopped. Instead, it could have stopped in
microwave background have given us reason our universe but continued happening elsewhere,
creating an infinite number of “bubble” universes.
to believe in something extraordinary – a The inflating space between these bubble
super-rapid expansion of space and time just universes would quickly hurl them apart, so
they had little chance of interacting. But if the
after the big bang. But questions about this baby universes formed sufficiently close together,
epoch of “inflation” remain. Can quantum they could have collided before being separated –
which suggests we might find support for inflation in
theory give us the answers we seek? evidence of these collisions, presumably as some sort
of marks or “scars” left behind in our own universe.
But how do you even go about looking for these scars?
Cosmologists have pursued various avenues of evidence
for an inflation-fuelled multiverse over the years, but
most agree that the best place to look is the CMB.
In 2011, Matt Johnson, a theoretical physicist at
the Perimeter Institute in Canada, along with Hiranya
Peiris at University College London and her colleagues,
showed that colliding bubble universes should leave
circle-shaped scars in the CMB. They created an
algorithm to comb previous images of the CMB
for such imprints. What they found was promising:
four patches of sky were compatible with the shape

30 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

YUREISAITO/ARTGRAB

of collision imprints. It was exciting, but not evidence. a process physicists call a phase transition,
There were uncertainties in the tests – namely the before eventually reaching a true vacuum.
rate at which new bubble universes should form and The trouble is that we can’t know for sure.
the probability that they would collide. This resulted The best support we have for this hypothetical
in large theoretical grey area. To reduce that and scenario comes from solving complex equations
to improve the predictions required a better grasp in quantum field theory, which require huge
of how universes are actually born. approximations. However, in 2017, physicists in
Quantum theory might be able to help here. New Zealand and Australia published a game-changing
In quantum theory, the lowest possible energy state research paper. Their work showed that, under the right
for space-time – the stage on which everything there conditions, the equations describing false vacuum decay
is plays out, including our possible multiverse – is in the early universe are equivalent to those describing
called a vacuum. But if the space between universes a quantum phase transition in a kind of exotic matter
is constantly inflating, it can’t be a true vacuum. called a Bose-Einstein condensate – usually comprised
Instead, there must be some inherent energy driving of atoms at extremely low temperatures – in which
the expansion. Quantum field theory, a mathematical bubbles akin to a true vacuum are created.
framework combining quantum theory and Albert By studying the formation and behaviour
Einstein’s theory of special relativity, suggests more of such bubbles in the lab, they argued, we could
than one vacuum state exists but that most are learn something about how multiple universes
“false” – that is, not the lowest possible energy. might have formed, filling gaps such as the
As nature always strives to reduce its energy, a false probabilities of bubble universes colliding and
vacuum isn’t fully stable. It is said to be “metastable”. providing evidence in support of inflation.
And in the quantum realm, things can mysteriously Some experiments have now been done, but
“tunnel” to a lower energy state – akin to a marble in there are no conclusive results as yet. Indeed, there
one valley suddenly appearing in the neighbouring is no proof yet that the experimental outcomes are
one without having gone over the hill between. indeed an early universe analogue: ultimately, the
Cosmologists care about these quantum researchers will have to compare their results with
processes, known as false vacuum decay, because approximate mathematical simulations and look
they could explain how the universe began, and for potential problems. They can then refine the
how other universes may have begun too. Our experiments to try to account for the problems and
observations of the start of our universe, including compare again until, hopefully, experiment and
its early rapid expansion, are consistent with it simulation fit. And if that doesn’t happen? We may
starting off as a bubble. This would have involved need to revise our theory of the early universe –
the cosmos tunnelling to a lower energy state, an equally exciting prospect for cosmologists. ❚

Chapter 2 | The first second | 31

ESSAY

BEYOND
FIRST LIGHT
Want to know more about the earliest N INSTANT after the big bang, a vast
shower of particles was released into
moments of the universe? Elusive, ghostly the cosmos. Ever since, they have
particles called neutrinos might shed light been flooding through space, carrying
with them secrets from the dawn
on the matter, says physicist Martin Bauer. of time. These ghostly things are
neutrinos, elementary particles
that we know exist but that are
exceedingly difficult to detect.
They pass clean through matter:
100 trillion of them are streaming through your
body every second and you never notice.
A fabulous prize awaits if we could spot them,
though. The big bang theory predicts that neutrinos
created in the first second of the universe would still
be flowing through the cosmos today. We call this the
CNB, or the cosmic neutrino background. If we could
detect it, it would paint us an unprecedented picture
of the universe in its very first moments, hundreds
PROFILE of thousands of years earlier than we have ever been
MARTIN able to see before. It would transform cosmology.
BAUER To understand why, we need to get to know
a bit more about neutrinos and how they travel.
Based at Durham The key thing is that neutrinos have a mass, albeit a
very tiny one. In fact, neutrinos come in three different
University in the UK,
types, each of which has a slightly different mass.
Martin Bauer researches Because of this, background neutrinos would end up
theoretical particle travelling at a range of speeds, all roughly 1000 times
physics, including the slower than light, as they stream towards us.
nature of dark matter As the cosmic neutrinos speed through the
and the detection of new universe, their course is bent by the gravitational pull
of huge objects like galaxies they pass, an effect called
particles with colliders
gravitational lensing. Because cosmic neutrinos are
and quantum sensors. travelling through space at different speeds, they
pass those huge objects at different times. This means
that, if we could scan the sky for cosmic neutrinos,

32 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 we could use them to glimpse the large-scale
structure of the universe at different times.
It won’t be easy. The earliest idea to find
neutrinos was proposed in 1962 by the late
Nobel-winning physicist Steven Weinberg.
He was inspired by a technology that was used
to first discover non-background neutrinos in
the 1950s and later used to detect solar neutrinos.
It turns out that, if a neutrino hits an atom,
it can be captured, imparting enough energy to
transform one of the atom’s constituent particles,
a proton, into another, a neutron. The chemical
elements are defined by how many protons they
NATURE AND SCIENCE/ALAMY

have, so if this process happens, it produces a

different chemical element – that is detectable
and is a surefire sign that a neutrino was involved.
In 1970, physicists Raymond Davis Jr. and John
Bahcall set out to find these signs by filling a tank with
380,000 litres of a liquid rich in chlorine. If a neutrino
hit one of the chlorine atoms, it would turn it into an
Researchers patiently wait for atom of argon. The only problem was that incoming
flashes of light which tell of a cosmic rays – high-energy particles from space – could
passing neutrino at Daya Bay do the same thing. So the pair placed their tank in the
Neutrino Experiment in China decommissioned Homestake gold mine in South
Dakota, almost 1500 metres underground. While
cosmic rays were screened out, neutrinos sped through
the ground and turned some of the buried chlorine
into argon. By counting how many, Davis and Bahcall
were able to work out the rate of flow of solar neutrinos –
and net themselves the Nobel prize in physics in 2002.
However, the energy of cosmic neutrinos would
be a billion times smaller than the lowest energy
neutrino from other sources that we have observed
so far, making them inestimably hard to catch. So far,
all the ideas mooted for snaring the lower-energy
neutrinos of the CNB have rather serious difficulties. >

Chapter 2 | The first second | 33

 Recently, though, my PhD student Jack Shergold set-up like this so that we have collisions with
and I have come up with an alternative possible route enough energy to detect cosmic neutrinos.
to discovery. It is based on overcoming the primary If we employed the chlorine-to-argon transition
obstacle of each proposed experiment: that cosmic used in the Homestake experiment, that would
neutrinos carry so incredibly little energy. require an accelerator with an energy a million
In normal neutrino detectors, huge vats of atoms times greater than that of the Large Hadron
are sitting still waiting for relatively fast-moving Collider (LHC). This is, of course, a huge problem.
solar neutrinos to strike them. When it comes to But there are other kinds of ions that might work.
cosmic neutrinos, they are moving much slower For example, we could accelerate helium ions which,
and have less energy, so the collisions are harder if struck by a neutrino, would transform into tritium.
to detect. We can’t do anything about the neutrinos. To get this working, we would need an accelerator
But what about the target atoms? Could we somehow only about 100 times more powerful than the LHC.
accelerate them so that when they collide with Not a piece of cake, but not out of the question either.
cosmic neutrinos the overall crash is harder? Another challenge would be to accelerate the large
Accelerating atoms is difficult, since they numbers of ions needed; it would be many more than
are electrically neutral. This means they aren’t typically used in particle-smashing experiments.
influenced by the strong electromagnetic fields We are still at an early stage with the research
that are used in accelerators such as those at CERN in in this area. The trick will be to find ions that
Switzerland to get charged particles, like protons, to will interact with neutrinos at as low an energy as
near the speed of light. Yet there is a trick we can pull: possible. That way, we would need fewer of them –
if we strip off some of an atom’s outer electrons, this perhaps many orders of magnitude fewer.
produces a charged version of the atom called an ion. Finding ions with the correct properties to make this
This can be accelerated using common technology, a reality may not be any easier than realising Weinberg’s
and the fact that an electron is gone makes little experiment. Yet the challenge is different and much less
difference to any interactions with neutrinos. well explored, which makes it worth investigating.
Shergold and I have considered a situation Some of the biggest discoveries in physics –
in which we use an accelerator to speed up a large from the Higgs boson to gravitational waves – were
number of ions. Cosmic background neutrinos decades in the making. It will likewise take time to
would flood through the accelerator all the time, corner the first cosmic neutrinos. But we could be
in the same way that they pass through your body. one breakthrough away from finding the ghostly
We calculate that it would be possible to design a particles that carry the universe’s earliest secrets. ❚

34 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 Essential Guides

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CHAPTER 3

36 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

Astronomical observations and cosmological considerations
suggest that there is a lot of stuff missing from our inventory
of the universe. According to cosmologists’ best estimates –
based on data that has been tested for decades now – around
85 per cent of the universe’s matter is exotic stuff that doesn’t
reflect, emit or absorb light. It’s known as “dark matter”.

The only force that this hypothetical stuff definitely deigns

to interact with, as far as we know, is gravity. This makes it
incredibly difficult to detect. A slew of ingenious experimenters
have attempted to find traces of dark matter in situations as
varied as detectors placed at the bottom of mineshafts and in
the data from CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. So far, everyone
has come away empty-handed. But no one is giving up.

Chapter 3 | The dark side | 37

MYSTERIOUS
GRAVITATIONAL
GLUE
In pursuit of dark matter, researchers HE first hints that something dark
permeates the universe came in the
are doing everything from burying vats 1930s, when astronomers spotted
of xenon deep underground to sending something odd. Clusters of galaxies
were rotating far faster than they should
a balloon floating above the Antarctic. have been. At such rotational speeds,
When will their creativity pay off? from our understanding of gravity and
dynamics, some of their constituent
parts should have been flung off
into the depths of space, but they
were holding together. Maybe, suggested Swiss
astronomer Fritz Zwicky, there was some matter
that we couldn’t see holding everything in place.
The hunt for Zwicky’s “dark material” never
really took off, partly because there were lots of
questionable assumptions behind his assertion.
Things changed in 1970, though, when Vera Rubin
and Kent Ford at the Carnegie Institution of Science
in Washington DC made a surprising discovery about
the Andromeda galaxy. They noticed a small-scale
version of Zwicky’s observation: the stars within the
galaxy were rotating around its centre faster than
expected. They should have been flung off, but,
again, something was holding them in place.
This is when the hunt for dark matter began. >

38 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

IAREMENKO/ISTOCK

Chapter 3 | The dark side | 39

Rubin predicted we would know exactly what this of experiments are still widely considered our best
strange galaxy glue was within a decade. But 1980 came bet to find dark matter. The latest is the DARWIN
and went, and we were none the wiser. In 1999, the UK’s detector proposed for the Gran Sasso Laboratory
Astronomer Royal Martin Rees again predicted we in Italy, which will use 50 tonnes of xenon. Annual
would have found it within a decade. We didn’t. “My global production is around 70 tonnes; physicists
confidence in us quickly pinning down the nature of really are going all out on this idea.
dark matter was certainly misplaced,” says Rees. Today, But there are no guarantees. For a start, most of the
we still don’t know what dark matter is made of. potential masses that WIMPs might come with have
The decades since Rees’s prediction have helped been ruled out. If WIMPs were on the heavy side, we
us rule out a few potential candidates. Peering into the would have seen them by now in underground vats
distant universe has led us to be pretty sure that it isn’t or as a product of protons smashing together at the
comprised of massive planets or black holes, known as Large Hadron Collider near Geneva, Switzerland.
massive compact halo objects, or MACHOs. If it were, The tricky thing with WIMPs is that the lighter
we would probably have seen these objects bending they are, the harder they are to find. Most current
cosmic light in predictable ways. detection methods largely rely on the WIMP having
a certain minimum mass, around that of 10 electrons.
→- “[Detectors] are underground waiting for a dark
There’s more on black holes in Chapter 5- matter particle to hit a xenon atom and make it wiggle,”
says Martin Bauer at Durham University, UK. “But if
For much of the past 40 years, physicists have been the particle is too light, the xenon atom is not going
on the hunt for another dark matter candidate: weakly to recoil.” In that case, physicists run into another
interacting massive particles (WIMPs). These would be problem. Neutrinos produced by the sun are passing
particles not found in the standard model of particle through Earth in their trillions every second. They
physics, our current best understanding of the forces would also leave traces in the xenon that are impossible
and particles that make up the most fundamental to disentangle from those of light WIMPs. “There’s no
building blocks of nature. way to shield against solar neutrinos,” says Bauer.
WIMPs were dreamed up with all the attributes Katherine Freese, a cosmologist at the University
dark matter seemed to exhibit. They also had the of Texas at Austin, has been involved with the hunt
desirable virtue of being within reach of purpose-built for dark matter for decades now, calculating how
detectors, should their trajectory happen to collide various kinds of particles might be discovered. “It’s
with an atomic nucleus. If a WIMP gave it a reasonable rough that nothing’s been seen, but the calculations
kick, the nucleus’s recoil energy would then be we did were just the easiest ones to find,” she says.
released as a flash of light that we could spot. “I’m not giving up. In fact, we’re really having fun.”
Getting a detection requires having a lot of large Some researchers get their kicks by chasing
nuclei. That led physicists to design and build detectors alternative hypothetical particles, such as the axion.
that use enormous vats of supercooled liquid xenon, Still others are looking for a dark equivalent for each
ready and waiting for a kick from a WIMP. These kinds particle in the standard model. Searches for this

40 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 THE AXION
OPTION
“dark sector” have begun, with researchers firing Hypothetical particles called axions could
high-intensity electron beams at targets in the hope
that they might emit a “dark photon”, for instance. explain dark matter, and more besides.
But particles aren’t the only contenders. Freese Though the idea has been around a while,
is also looking for “dark stars” – balls of dark matter
that could have formed in the early universe. One it’s enjoying a resurgence.
hypothesis says that if dark matter particles interact,
they annihilate. If dark matter interacted with itself
just a little bit, this would release enough energy EARLY 50 years ago, physicist
to create stars long before the ones we are familiar Frank Wilczek took a walk that
with started to shine. Freese and her colleagues have would change the course of particle
calculated that instruments on the James Webb Space physics forever. On that walk, he had
Telescope (JWST) might be able to show us these stars. the germs of two profound ideas.
Clearly, the possibilities are legion. For some, The first was how a theoretical
though, the fact that pretty much “anything goes” particle, later dubbed the Higgs
is a sign that the whole enterprise is a wild-goose boson, might interact with other
chase. “You can’t just keep moving the goalposts,” particles. This would be how the
says Stacy McGaugh at Case Western Reserve Higgs was found decades later.
University in Ohio. “There has to be a point at The second idea has taken a little longer to catch on.
which you decide you’ve done what you can, and you Wilczek, who is based at the Massachusetts Institute
stop.” McGaugh gave up on dark matter decades ago. of Technology, had imagined a way that very light –
Now, he is working on the idea that we can explain essentially massless – particles could be made.
the galaxy rotation anomalies in a different way. He talked to his colleague, the late Steven Weinberg,
McGaugh is a supporter of what is called modified who had been thinking along the same lines. Together,
Newtonian dynamics (MOND) – a controversial they predicted a class of particles we now call axions.
idea that proposes rewriting the laws of gravity. Axions, if they exist, would abide by the strange
One way to do this is by altering the equation of rules of quantum mechanics, meaning they could act as
Newton’s law of universal gravitation in a way both waves and particles. As particles, they would have
that changes how strong gravitational attraction an exceptionally low mass, ranging from hundreds to
between two masses is over cosmological scales. billions of times smaller than the lightest particles we
Most in the field are a long way from being ready know of today. Because they would be so light, their
to give up on dark matter. Although no one can know wavelength could be as long as the width of a galaxy.
when, or how, or even if, dark matter will show up Not that axions were originally meant to be a
in the end. “I think we’re going to have to get lucky,” solution to cosmological mysteries. Instead, the first
says theorist Kathryn Zurek at the California Institute issue they resolved was something called the strong
of Technology. “But if we don’t look, we’re certainly charge-parity problem. This is a mystery in particle
not going to find it.” ❚ physics related to the strong force, one of the four >

Chapter 3 | The dark side | 41

fundamental forces. Unlike the other three, separate but related mystery. Namely, that dark matter
which affect matter and antimatter in different appears to clump together less than we would expect.
ways, the strong force affects subatomic particles Observations of the cosmic microwave background
called quarks to the same extent as their antimatter (CMB), the light left over from the inflation of the
counterpart, antiquarks. But if there were some early universe given off some 380,000 years after
kind of new field pervading the universe, composed the big bang, don’t match up with the distribution
of ultralight particles like axions, it could explain of clusters of galaxies we see today.
this unusual symmetry.
Then, in 1983, various physicists, including Wilczek, ←-
began to realise that this new kind of field could also Go back to Chapter 2 to read more-
solve another major problem. In the early universe, about the CMB-
there was lots of energy, and as the universe cooled,
the axion field would have started oscillating, giving This problem, known as the “sigma-8 tension”, was
off energy in the form of pulsating light and heat. first spotted by Catherine Heymans at the University
The energy carried in those oscillations turns of Edinburgh in the UK. But if dark matter were even
out to behave just like dark matter, which is why partly composed of ultralight axions, meaning those
axions have become a candidate for dark matter. at the lower end of the potential mass range, these
But how to check whether this is wishful thinking? axions might suppress the clumping.
The problem is, axions are good at hiding. This is Evidence for this could come soon, if we are lucky.
mostly because they could come in a dramatically Such axions might show up in experiments seeking
wide range of possible masses, so knowing where to find gravitational waves, ripples in space-time
to look for them is tricky. However, there are still caused by massive objects spinning or colliding,
good reasons to back axionic dark matter. for example. Experiments measuring the arrival
One comes from the way light bends around galaxies times of light pulses from rapidly spinning stars,
due to their gravity. Most galaxies are thought to be known as pulsar timing arrays, have revealed the
surrounded by halos of dark matter. We see this in the first evidence for a gravitational wave background
way they rotate, which appears to be uniform. From pervading the universe. These waves turn out to be a
this, astronomers deduce that they must be pulled great way to measure the distribution of dark matter
equally, in all directions, by some unseen force. in the cosmos, too: oscillating axions would leave
This is where axions come in. Their wavelength, imprints in these gravitational wave signatures.
the distance over which they oscillate, could be up So far, the datasets aren’t sensitive enough to detect
to 3000 light years. But like ripples in a pond, these such imprints, but the results should continue to
oscillations would interact with each other, causing improve as more pulses are measured, narrowing
interference. In a dark matter halo, that might form down a potential signal of axion dark matter.
noticeable regions of higher-density and lower-density If axions do turn up, they could clean up a whole
axions: a very lumpy halo. In 2023, astronomers led number of messes with our universe. In that regard,
by Alfred Amruth at the University of Hong Kong they would truly live up to their detergent-inspired
published evidence for such a lumpy structure, in the name. Wilczek, for one, is convinced that we will find
way light bent around a galaxy on its way to Earth. them, eventually. “Theoretically, there’s no other
This is an exciting development, because if axions way to solve the problems it addresses,” he says.
are the answer to dark matter, they could solve a “This particle more or less has to exist.” ❚

42 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

ESSAY

WHAT IS DARK ENERGY?

A mysterious energy source is causing the T WAS Albert Einstein who showed that what
we mean by gravity is really the geometry of
universe’s expansion to accelerate. We know space and time. His general theory of relativity
almost nothing about this “dark energy”, describes how space-time is deformed and
stretched by whatever it holds and, in return,
which makes up around 70 per cent of the different constituents of the universe coast
the universe’s energy. However, we have along its bends and warps. If we apply Einstein’s
idea to the whole of space-time, we find that
very good reason to believe it is real, the universe expands according to the
as cosmologist Pedro Ferreira explains. underlying geometry of space itself.

←-
For more about Einstein’s space-time,-
go back to Chapter 1-
The geometry of the universe can take three
possible forms, each of which is intimately related
to the total amount of matter and energy in each
unit-volume of space. If there is too much stuff, the
PROFILE universe will have a positive curvature. This means
PEDRO it curves like the surface of a ball and may collapse
FERREIRA in a big crunch. Too little and the curvature will
be negative: the universe will curve like a saddle,
Pedro Ferreira flying apart unfettered by the gravitational pull.
Only if the universe has exactly the right
is a professor of
density, corresponding to a few protons per
astrophysics at the cubic metre, will it be flat and have zero curvature.
University of Oxford. It will continue expanding forever because the
He is also the author energy of all the constituents that are flying apart
of The Perfect Theory, carefully balances their gravitational pull.
a biography of Because it is so central to the evolution of the
universe, understanding the curvature of space
General Relativity.
is one of cosmology’s great goals. Before the late
1990s, we suspected that the universe had to be
almost flat. Otherwise it would have either flown >

Chapter 3 | The dark side | 43

 POSITIVE CURVATURE
Hot and cold spots appear larger

apart or collapsed very early on in its existence. and assuming the universe is flat, we can use
But all we had was a rough idea and little else. In fact, standard trigonometry to work out the angular
at any given conference on cosmology at the time, size of the spots in the sky.
a few different models would be discussed: one with I said “assuming the universe is flat”. If the universe
flat geometry and full of dark matter, another, also flat isn’t flat, then we have to use a different set of rules.
and containing dark energy, and yet another one that The typical size of hot and cold spots in a flat universe
was emptier than all the others and so had negative should be about 1 degree across the sky, approximately
curvature. Every now and then, the possibility that we twice the angular size of the moon as seen from
lived in a positively curved universe would be mooted, the ground. If the hot and cold spots look bigger to
but without firm, precise observations, there was us, then space has positive curvature. If they look
much rhetoric and no conclusions. smaller, then the curvature is negative (see above).
This changed as measurements of the cosmic In 1992, NASA’s COBE satellite provided the first
microwave background (CMB), the radiation left all-sky map of the hot and cold spots. The pictures
over from the big bang, became more accurate, and a were simply too blurred to pin down the universe’s
simple method to use them took hold. In the late 1960s, geometry, but they triggered a gold rush as teams vied
a group led by Yakov Zel’Dovich in the Soviet Union with each other for clearer pictures of the CMB, hoping to
published a short paper showing that an accurate map focus in on that magical angular scale of about 1 degree.
of CMB radiation would have very distinct features: In 1995, I moved to the University of California,
it should consist of randomly distributed hot and Berkeley, where cosmologists were hard at work on
cold spots with a characteristic size. the coalface of research into the CMB. I had started
life as a theorist, but with COBE and the potential
←- for true discovery, I decided to roll up my sleeves
For more on the CMB, turn back to Chapter 2- and get my hands dirty. For me, this involved
preparing for the launch and then analysing
Zel’Dovich’s group calculated how large the spots the signals collected by two experiments carried
were when they formed 370,000 years after the big aloft by balloons: Maxima and Boomerang.
bang, an era in cosmic history known as recombination. Both experiments carried a new breed of
How large the spots appear to us today depends microwave detectors that were far more sensitive
on how fast the universe has expanded since then. than any used before. They were also each equipped
Under reasonably simple assumptions about what with telescopes that were over an order of magnitude
the universe is made of, we can determine the distance more accurate than those on the COBE satellite.
to recombination with some accuracy. Knowing this, Both of these features meant that they were able

44 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 NEGATIVE CURVATURE
Hot and cold spots appear smaller

to accurately map out the fine details of the CMB. it flat; the shortfall in the total energy of the universe
There had already been strong hints of the seems to be about 70 per cent. And if this were so, the
coveted spots in 1997 from an experiment called universe would have negative curvature. There must
MAT/Toco. But it was only after a few years of whittling be something else out there to make up the deficit.
away at the signals in early 2000 that we saw our own The answer came in 1998, when two separate teams
clear evidence of hot and cold spots with a typical noted that distant supernovae were much dimmer
size of 1 degree. This meant that the geometry of than they should be. By far the simplest explanation is
the universe was almost exactly flat. We were that the expansion of the universe is now accelerating.
seeing direct and unambiguous evidence that Now, if the universe is accelerating then something
we lived in a very special universe. must be pushing space-time apart. We have found
Together with later measurements from that if 70 per cent of the universe is made up of an
NASA’s WMAP satellite, the results nailed down exotic, repulsive material called dark energy, then
the geometry of the universe to within a few per cent. it could make up the shortfall of energy. So even
Suddenly, life became much simpler for cosmologists though 96 per cent of the universe is invisible to
who had been working on different theoretical us in the form of dark matter and dark energy,
models with different geometries. From then on, it does neatly explain the cosmos.
there was one fewer free parameter to fiddle with, Einstein had proposed a possible candidate for this
and almost all the papers and textbooks stated repulsive form of energy: the cosmological constant,
up front that the universe was flat. Finally we had or lambda, is a completely smooth form of energy
some certainty about the state of the universe. that never dilutes as space expands. Lambda has
Except that another dramatic narrative was been adopted wholesale by many cosmologists, so
unfolding in parallel. For decades, we had known much so that the current, standard model is known
that there simply wasn’t enough stuff in the universe as the lambda-cold dark matter model. And one
to balance the cosmic books. All the known atoms of its main features is that the universe is flat.
in stars, gas and dust spread out in the cosmos But it isn’t that simple. To be brutally honest, we have
add up to less than 4 per cent of the total matter no idea what lambda physically represents. Even our
and energy we knew had to exist for the universe best guess gives us the wrong answer by more than a
to have developed to its current state. hundred orders of magnitude. So given our manifest
Even taking into account the elusive dark matter ignorance, we have to allow for other possibilities:
that we believe bolsters galaxies and allows them dark energy may not be constant in time and space. As
to spin at breakneck speeds without flying apart, long as our models predict the right amount of cosmic
there still isn’t enough matter and energy to make acceleration, we are allowed to keep our options open. ❚

Chapter 3 | The dark side | 45

PROFILE
JIM
PEEBLES
Jim Peebles is Albert
Einstein Professor in
Science, emeritus, at
Princeton University. In
2019 he was awarded one
half of the Nobel prize in
physics “for contributions
to our understanding
of the evolution of the
universe and Earth’s
place in the cosmos”. An image of the Serpens
Nebula taken by the James
Webb Space Telescope
 ESSAY

GOING
DEEPER
Nobel prizewinner Jim Peebles introduced When, in 1984, I first argued for the cosmological
constant’s reintroduction, at a tiny value that looks
dark matter and dark energy into our preposterous but works, I remember a capable younger
standard model of the cosmos – but that physicist saying to me something along the lines of the
quote from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: “He only
is only an approximation of a deeper truth, does it to annoy, because he knows it teases.” I knew
he says. Here he explains how we can it was annoying, but I was serious. Vindication came
almost two decades later, when results from three great
head towards a final theory of physics. experimental programmes in cosmology arrived.
The first set of results came from a thoroughly
cross-checked array of feasible, though difficult,
SCEPTIC might view complications methods to measure the average cosmic matter
such as dark matter and dark density, which by 2000 had produced a good
energy as today’s equivalent of the case that the universe is indeed expanding faster
Ptolemaic epicycles, the convoluted than escape speed. The escape speed is the name
tweaks made to the model of the given to the rate of expansion at which the gravity
planets’ motions to maintain the pulling together the universe’s matter is just enough
fiction that they were all revolving to slow expansion down, but never quite stop it
around Earth. I have more skin in or reverse it back to a “big crunch”.
NASA, ESA, CSA, STSCI, KLAUS PONTOPPIDAN (NASA-JPL), JOEL GREEN (STSCI)

this game than most: I introduced The second confirmation came from measurements
the mystery elements of dark matter of the universe’s changing rate of expansion by
and dark energy into our standard cosmology. detection of the light from supernovae exploding in
So, is the model I helped construct right; is our distant galaxies. Far-off galaxies are seen as they were
cosmology a true reflection of reality? in the past because of the time light takes to travel to
Dark energy is the current incarnation of the us, and the Doppler shift also changes the wavelength
cosmological constant. Albert Einstein introduced of that light according to the galaxy’s motion relative
this in 1917 with the intention of maintaining a static to us. By 2000, the data from supernovae in galaxies at
universe that was neither expanding nor contracting, different distances pretty convincingly showed that the
a situation he seemed to have taken for granted. He came rate of expansion isn’t only greater than escape speed,
to dislike it when observations in the following decade but is also growing over time. The measurement led
proved the static model wrong. Particle physicists to the rebranding of the cosmological constant as dark
today really dislike it because its natural value, the energy, and later to the 2011 Nobel prize being awarded
quantum vacuum energy density, is ridiculously large jointly to three members of two competing teams:
compared with what is required to fit the evidence. Saul Perlmutter, Adam Riess and Brian Schmidt. >

Chapter 3 | The dark side | 47

 The third vindication for the cosmological constant measurements of how the cosmic microwave
hypothesis came from the precise measurement background varies across the sky. If the model is
of the variation in the temperature and polarisation right, the two measurements ought to give the same
of the cosmic microwave background radiation answer. Maybe the difference is down to a subtle
across the sky, which yielded a tight constraint systematic error, which wouldn’t be surprising for
on the effects of dark energy and dark matter. these difficult measurements. Or maybe it is evidence
Why did these three great efforts reach the of something new. I haven’t joined the search for
required precision to make these measurements what that something new may be, but I will be
at close to the same time? I suppose it was, in part, fascinated to see what people come up with.
simple coincidence. But all three relied on technological There are other cross-checks we can do to
advances in the detection of radiation, from X-rays test the standard cosmological model, for example
to optical light to radio waves, and great improvements on the abundance of helium. We have three ways to
in computing power and storage to deal with the vast estimate this. First, the measured relative abundances
amount of data they produced. The technology was by of hydrogen and deuterium allow us to predict how
and large developed for other purposes – it is what gave much helium formed in thermonuclear reactions
us people walking about looking at their smartphones in the hot early stages of the universe’s expansion,
instead of where they are going – and was adapted when the cosmic microwave background had a
by inventive astronomers for cosmological tests. temperature a billion times its current level of
The consistent case from these three different 3 kelvin above absolute zero. This prediction assumes
ways of probing the universe convinced most our cosmological model is a good approximation
cosmologists that the model with dark matter all the way back to that very early time, of course.
and dark energy is almost certainly on the right Second, we can estimate the helium abundance
track. Since then, measurements have tightened the from the distributions of matter and radiation
evidence. But I had assembled this cosmology out of when the background temperature of the universe
the simplest assumptions I thought I could get away was a thousand times its present value, hot enough
with. I can’t have consistently guessed right. Indeed, that baryonic matter was ionised and the resulting
precise measurements have shown that the initial plasma tightly bound to the radiation. Helium is
conditions I assumed – for instance in the detail of denser than hydrogen, so its presence affects the
how matter warps space-time – were a little out. way that the plasma moves in response to the
Surely there are more adjustments to come. pressure of surrounding radiation.
An example may be the current 10 per cent discrepancy Third, astronomers can measure how much
in the rate of the universe’s expansion derived in two helium there is in nearby stars and plasma. All three
different ways. One, like the supernova measurements methods provide consistent results so far, which
honoured by the Nobel committee in 2011, uses is really impressive. Surely they will continue to
measurements of the distances to galaxies and their do so as the measurements improve in accuracy?
rates of motion away from us derived from Doppler Maybe, but wouldn’t it be exciting if they didn’t?
shifts. The other comes from adjusting the parameters Yet even if continued agreement further bolsters
of the cosmological model to fit the precise our confidence in the accuracy of the model, the central

48 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 Maps of the big bang’s
microwave afterglow from
three generations of probes.

mysteries of dark matter and dark energy remain.

Cold dark matter is still a hypothetical substance,
despite laboratory experiments since the 1980s of
ever-increasing sensitivity looking for its occasional
predicted interactions with normal matter. Detection
would be really exciting. But it is possible that dark
matter is completely decoupled from the baryonic
matter and radiation we are familiar with, never to be
detected, apart from through its gravitational effect
holding galaxies together that we already know of.
NASA/COBE

COBE (operational 1989-1993) And what should we make of dark energy? A great
deal of work is now focused on discovering whether
its value changes as the universe expands. That would
mean it isn’t a cosmological constant with a really odd
value, but rather that it plays a role in the universe’s
dynamics. Working out that role would be both
a great challenge and a great opportunity.
Then there are those other great challenges for modern
cosmology, such as explaining precisely what happened
at the big bang. The elegant idea of ballooning cosmic
inflation smooths out some otherwise inexplicable
wrinkles in that story, and suggests the big bang may
have spawned a multiverse of universes beyond
NASA/WMAP

WMAP (2001- 2010) our own. But again, that idea lacks evidence.

←-
For more on the inflationary multiverse,-
go back to Chapter 2-
We haven’t been issued a guarantee that we can
make sense of the physical world around us, or detect
ESA AND THE PLANCK COLLABORATION

things such as dark matter. But as things stand, all

of physics is still incomplete. I certainly don’t mean
wrong, I mean that it can all be improved. Maybe
there is a final theory of physics, or maybe it is
approximations all the way down. And so it is with
Planck (2009-2013) cosmology. I don’t expect our current model will
prove to be false. But I do expect we can do better. ❚

Chapter 3 | The dark side | 49

CHAPTER 4

50 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

The enigmas of dark matter and dark energy aren’t the only
signs that there are plenty more cosmic secrets left for us
to uncover. Excited cosmologists now have a workshop
full of new tools that may help to expose them.

Just for starters, there’s a suite of new telescopes through

which we can gain a novel perspective on the cosmos. And
thrilling new capabilities in magnetic field and gravitational
wave detection may expose a rich seam of cosmic events
that went previously unnoticed.

For the past couple of decades, we thought we were living

through cosmology’s “golden age”. It seems, however, that
the best may still be to come. That’s certainly what the first
observations from the astonishing eye-in-the-sky that is
the James Webb Space Telescope suggest.

Chapter 4 | The seeds of revolution | 51

SEEING FURTHER
WITH JWST
The most powerful space telescope yet can HE James Webb Space Telescope was,
prior to its launch, perhaps the most
give us a clear picture of the first stars and hotly anticipated scientific instrument
reveal the atmospheres of exoplanets too. ever. It is a time machine that helps
us see back to the enigmatic era of
the universe’s first stars, which we
know precious little about. Unreal, too,
because it can reveal the atmospheres
of potentially habitable planets orbiting
other stars more clearly than ever before.
It is no exaggeration to say that this telescope, with
its gigantic gold-plated mirror, is transforming our
view of the universe and our place in it.
The JWST’s story begins around Christmas 1995.
That year, the world was gripped by O. J. Simpson’s
murder trial, Bridget Jones first appeared in print and
Forrest Gump won big at the Oscars. For 10 December
days, the Hubble Space Telescope stared at a patch of
featureless sky that could be covered by a pinhead
held at arm’s length. As far as ground-based telescopes
were concerned, this region of the sky was empty.
But some astronomers suspected that a closer
look was warranted.
What emerged, now known as the Hubble Deep >

52 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the largest, most powerful telescope
ever launched into space. After blasting off, it travelled 1.5 million kilometres from
Earth to a spot called Lagrange point 2 (L2). Here, the gravitational pulls of our planet
and the sun cancel out and the telescope is able to orbit this point, remaining in an
almost static position with respect to us and the sun.

MOON ORBIT ONE MONTH AFTER LAUNCH,

TELESCOPE ENTERED ORBIT
AROUND L2

LAUNCH
TELESCOPE BEGINS
TO UNFOLD

The telescope is designed to pick up the tiniest specks of infrared radiation, or heat, from ancient stars and HOT COLD
SUN SIDE SIDE
galaxies. Orbiting so far from Earth, the sun and moon makes it easier to avoid heat coming from those bodies. 85˚C -233˚C
Nonetheless, JWST still needs a huge heat shield, which was unfurled on its journey through space

1 2 3 4
The JWST's Once on its way, Next, the The unfolding
6.5-metre-wide the telescope secondary mirror finished
mirror is too began to unfold. and support with the
large to fit The first step was structure were deployment of
aboard a rocket, to separate out unfolded. It is the telescope's
so it launched and tension the crucial that the lateral wings
in a folded up five layers of the alignment is
configuration sun shield just right

After six months of testing and adjusting the primary mirrors, in July 2022, JWST released
its first dazzling images. Already its findings are challenging models of cosmic evolution and
intensifying the search for extraterrestrial life.

1990
Ground-based
observatories

1995
Hubble
Deep Field

2004
Hubble Ultra
Deep Field

2009
Hubble Ultra
Deep Field - IR

2022
James Webb
Space
Telescope
Billions of years ago

0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 13.2 13.4 13.6 13.8

METHUSELA, BIG
THE SUN FORMS THE FIRST BANG
THE MILKY WAY KNOWN STAR,
EARTH FORMS GALAXY FORMS FORMS
FIRST COSMIC
BLACK MICROWAVE
HOLES BACKGROUND
FORM RADIATION
RELEASED

Chapter 4 | The seeds of revolution | 53

Field image, showed that this patch of space is big bang – all we had were indirect glimpses. Light
crammed with 3000 galaxies, each about 4 billion from the first stars is thought to have interacted with
times fainter than the human eye can see. Among leftover hydrogen in the early universe, changing
them were the oldest galaxies we had ever viewed. the way that gas absorbed the cosmic microwave
Light may be fast, but it still takes a lot of time background (CMB), remnant radiation from the
to reach us when travelling across the universe. big bang that we can still detect.
Because of this, we know that the further objects But the JWST is primarily designed to see infrared
are from us, the older the light from them is. But how light from the earliest stars. Its sensitivity is 100 to
to tell the age of any given star or galaxy? Fortunately, 1000 times higher than current or previous infrared
a quirk of starlight can help. Because the universe has telescopes, and its impact has been compared
been expanding since the big bang, light travelling long to jumping from Galileo Galilei’s telescope to
distances gets stretched out as it goes. This changes modern mountaintop observatories.
its wavelength, pushing it from the visible spectrum There is, however, a major problem when it comes
further into the infrared. This “redshift” was extreme to observing infrared light. It isn’t just given off by
for some of the galaxies Hubble had discovered, ancient stars and galaxies, but by warm objects of all
showing that they were more than 10 billion kinds – including the sun and our planet. This means
years old. That takes us a long way back towards that a space telescope can’t simply be placed in a typical
the big bang 13.8 billion years ago. Earth orbit. Heat from Earth would blind it to the faint
Astronomers hadn’t expected that galaxies glimmers from ancient stars. It would be like trying to
this ancient would be detectable, especially not in hear a whisper at the universe’s loudest rock concert.
such numbers. Appetites whetted, they hatched a That’s why the JWST has a huge sun shield and why
plan to get a better look at the universe in its flush of it sits at a special point in space about four times
youth. In early 1996, a group of stargazers convened further from Earth than the moon is.
to kick-start work on what was then called the Next This new eye in the sky is the largest space
Generation Space Telescope. That became the JWST, telescope in history. Its 6.5-metre mirror – taller than
which is now a joint project between NASA, ESA and a four-storey building – couldn’t fit inside a rocket in
the Canadian Space Agency. its final configuration. So it is made of 18 hexagonal
As they waited, the thirst to see the universe’s first segments that were folded up for launch and unfurled
stars deepened. A star produces chemical elements when the telescope reached space. Each mirror
inside it as it burns, then spews them into space as it segment is covered in an incredibly thin layer of
dies, often in an explosive supernova. Some of that gold, which significantly increases the mirror’s
debris eventually coalesces into a new generation of ability to reflect and focus infrared light.
stars – and the cycle repeats. Going back in time, it is That means we get a better view of alien planets.
thought that stars would have been made of mixtures So far, almost all of our observations of exoplanets
of simpler elements. The first stars would have formed have involved visible light. But the chemistry of their
from clouds of hydrogen and helium, the simplest atmospheres will show up much more clearly in the
elements, at a point called the cosmic dawn. They infrared, the kind of light that the JWST is optimised
would have started to form heavier elements, but only to detect. One especially exciting prospect is that
slowly. The trouble is, our accounting for where the bonds between carbon atoms – a telltale sign of the
universe’s heavy elements came from doesn’t add up. organic chemistry that provides the scaffold for life
One idea is that the mysterious first stars had a more on Earth – will show up clearly in the infrared.
important role in creating them than we thought. New telescopes tend to bring unanticipated
discoveries too – just look at how Hubble shocked the
←- world when it stared at that apparently blank patch of
To learn more about the variety of stars in- sky. JWST has already delivered here. Its discoveries of
the universe, turn back to Chapter 1- puzzling early-forming stars, unexpected numbers of
early-universe supernovae, strange black holes and odd
Before JWST, we hadn’t been able to properly see stars galactic behaviours are, hopefully, just the beginning
that lived in the first few 100 million years after the of the beginning of a new era in cosmology. ❚

54 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 VIEW TO A THRILL
The JWST was only the entrée. The next decade or so will see plenty of other ground-breaking
observatories served up, including these three mouth-watering prospects.

PLANETARY TRANSITS AND NANCY GRACE ROMAN LASER INTERFEROMETER

OSCILLATIONS OF STARS (PLATO) SPACE TELESCOPE SPACE ANTENNA (LISA)
Expected launch date: 2026 Expected launch date: 2027 Expected launch date: 2034

This European Space Agency project Like the James Webb Space We first detected gravitational
will scour a million stars looking Telescope, the Roman Space waves, ripples in the fabric of
for blips in their light that betray Telescope, named after the first space, in 2015. So far, we have seen
the presence of an orbiting planet. female executive at NASA, will waves from black hole and neutron
Similar kinds of previous telescopes observe mainly infrared radiation. star collisions. LISA, a mission led
have only been able to see planets But while the JWST focuses on by the European Space Agency,
that are close to their stars and so detail, Roman is going for the will be a much larger gravitational
pass in front of them frequently. big picture. The telescope has a wave detector than existing ground-
Plato will linger on each star for panoramic field of view more than based ones. It will consist of three
longer and so has the chance to 100 times greater than the JWST’s. spacecraft positioned 2.5 million
detect planets that are more distant During its first five years, Roman kilometres apart in a triangular
from their star, with a longer orbital will image more than 50 times as formation. This space detector will
period. In particular, the mission is much sky as the Hubble Space be sensitive to gravitational waves
focused on trying to spot signs of Telescope covered in its first 30 with extremely low frequencies.
rocky exoplanets in the habitable years. That will allow it to make Among other things, it could allow
zone, the narrow region of a star the first wide-field infrared maps us to spot planets in other galaxies
system in which temperatures are of the sky. It is hoped this will help just from the subtle way in which
ESA/ATG MEDIALAB; NASA; ESA/C.CARREAU

right for liquid water. It also has the solve mysteries like the true identity they influence the gravitational
tools to characterise such worlds, of dark matter and dark energy. waves produced by their parent
providing clues as to how Earth-like Astronomers can see the influence stars. Until now, all confirmed
they may be. of these substances on the universe discoveries of exoplanets have
but haven’t been able to explain been in our own Milky Way galaxy.
what they are.

>

Chapter 4 | The seeds of revolution | 55

BALANCING ACT
Our understanding of the universe is HE “cosmological principle” says that
the universe is the same everywhere
underpinned by the cosmological principle: in all directions. It grew out of an
the assumption that, on the largest scales, essential tenet of cosmology: Nicolaus
Copernicus’s argument, made in the
it looks more or less the same in all 16th century, that Earth doesn’t occupy a
directions. New observations are telling special place in the universe, also known
as the Copernican principle. But the
us that assumption might be wrong. cosmological principle didn’t earn its
current exalted status until the 1920s,
when it made it possible to extract a workable model
of the universe from Albert Einstein‘s new theory
of gravity – general relativity.

←-
For more on general relativity, turn back to-
Sean Carroll’s introduction in Chapter 1-
Unfortunately, general relativity is as complex as it is
beautiful. Ten intertwined equations balance matter
and energy on one side and the warping of space-time
on the other. The only way to solve it is to make
sweeping assumptions about how matter and
energy are distributed and how space-time warps.
By assuming the universe is the same everywhere, or
homogeneous, and looks the same in every direction,
a feature known as isotropy, physicists were able to
boil down Einstein’s equations to extract a simple,
evolving universe that matched observations.
This “Friedmann–Lemaître–Robertson–Walker”
(FLRW) solution enshrined the cosmological principle,
and it remains the foundation of the standard model
of cosmology – our best theory of how the universe
evolved. Starting with the big bang, this perfect FLRW
cosmos expands symmetrically like a balloon filling
with air. Stars, galaxies and clusters then form by

56 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

allowing small deviations from what remains clusters of galaxies like Virgo, superclusters like
an otherwise smooth and uniform cosmos. the Great Attractor and perhaps even lumps of matter
The standard model works. When we take a beyond the horizon of what we can see. Our perspective
detailed map of light from the very early universe, is tilted relative to the symmetric expansion of the
known as the cosmic microwave background (CMB), universe as a whole.
and extrapolate forwards using the model, we get pretty
much exactly what we observe today. But with dark ←-
energy and dark matter in the mix, most cosmologists To learn more about galactic superclusters,-
would agree that the standard model is due an upgrade. go back to p 14-
However, a small cohort of cosmologists want to
go a bit further than an upgrade. For years, they have Subir Sarkar at the University of Oxford wants us to
been suggesting that we may need to do more than go further still. He claims to have found evidence that
just tinker with the standard model. That’s because, the entire universe is fundamentally skewed – and
they say, the vast, bubble-shaped voids around which therefore that the cosmological principle is broken.
galaxies are strung in filaments and clusters make the This starts with the CMB, which more or less glows
universe look suspiciously inhomogeneous. The same with the same temperature in every direction. Not
is true of vast walls made of galaxies and galactic quite, though. It appears lopsided to us, mainly because
superclusters. Then, last year, the discovery of a giant Earth is screeching around the Milky Way at hundreds
chain of galaxies stretching 3 billion light years across of kilometres a second. Just as the frequency of an
the sky, known as the Giant Arc, gave fresh impetus ambulance siren is distorted as it speeds past you,
to questions about the cosmological principle on the CMB is distorted by our motion in the universe.
which the standard model rests. In the 1980s, George Ellis, now at the University
The argument isn’t only that such outliers of Cape Town in South Africa, came up with a way to
provide more evidence against homogeneity on use this lopsidedness to check if the standard model
the biggest scales. It is also that the gravitational pull obeys the cosmological principle. The idea was that we
of such giant structures is what creates streams of should see exactly the same distortion in very distant
matter that drift like the breeze, known as “bulk flows”. galaxies because, like the CMB, distant galaxies act
These can travel at hundreds of kilometres a second like a fixed background against which we can measure
and stretch as far as a billion light years. our own motion. “If those two don’t match up very
That’s why Christos Tsagas at the Aristotle precisely, then your standard FLRW model is in
University of Thessaloniki in Greece is building “tilted” deep trouble,” says Ellis.
cosmological models that include such fast-moving Getting good data on very distant galaxies is tough,
streams of matter. Tsagas says we are in a bulk flow. as they are so faint and difficult to distinguish amid
We live on Earth, which orbits the sun, which orbits astronomical objects closer to home. Astrophysicists
the Milky Way, which is pulled towards Andromeda, were eventually able to perform the test in 2002 thanks
the nearest large galaxy to Earth, as well as towards to a large catalogue of galaxies, called the NVSS, >

Chapter 4 | The seeds of revolution | 57

gathered by the Very Large Array telescope in New entirely new ways of analysing data that don’t
Mexico. This showed that our motion through the assume all directions are the same. Unsurprisingly,
universe agreed fairly well with the CMB. And yet the most cosmologists have been reluctant to go along
relatively small number of galaxies, and the ambiguity with any of this, especially since there are conflicting
in how far away they actually are, left room to speculate. or inconclusive results on the question of a skew
“We realised that a better catalogue was required,” in the large-scale structure of the universe. What’s
says Sarkar, who in 2019 teamed up with Nathan more, studies of such distant objects as quasars
Secrest, an astronomer at the US Naval Observatory are riddled with potential errors.
in Washington DC. Secrest offered Sarkar and his But even people who think the data and analyses
colleagues a catalogue of 1.4 million quasars, known are solid see little reason to seriously consider this
as catWISE, gathered by the WISE space telescope. possibility. Peebles says that instead of hinting at
Quasars are very bright jets of light powered by a skewed universe, the data could be explained if
supermassive black holes in the centre of galaxies. quasars clump together much more than other
Compared with the NVSS, catWISE has many more types of matter on those scales.
sources spread across the whole sky rather than A new generation of telescopes is poised to
just a portion of it – important if you are trying offer some clarity. Observations by the Vera C. Rubin
to assess how skewed the universe is overall. Observatory in Chile, the Euclid space telescope and the
In 2021, Sarkar, Secrest and their colleagues reported Square Kilometre Array in South Africa and Australia
a distortion in the distribution of quasars that was in a should help. Between them, these observatories
similar direction as the CMB’s skew, but twice as big as will scour the night sky, looking at billions of very
that expected if Earth’s motion were the sole cause. The distant galaxies over a large swathe of sky.
implication is that instead of just bulk flows that drift This makes possible a far more precise test of the
across large parts of the universe, the entire universe cosmological principle. Ruth Durrer at the University
may be drifting too. In other words, according to Sarkar, of Geneva, Switzerland, proposes using different types
the underlying scaffold may be fundamentally skewed. of measurement from each telescope to untangle
If Sarkar and his colleagues are right, it would whether the lopsided CMB is entirely due to Earth’s
mean going back to Einstein’s equations to see what motion in the universe or whether there is also a
other solutions might fit our universe. Other than fundamental skew. Another approach would be to test
the smooth and uniform FLRW solution, there are the Copernican principle, from which the cosmological
about 20 other options to play with. Some assume principle grew, by envisioning what the CMB looks
the universe is smooth but not uniform (the Bianchi like to far-off observers. That is possible through
solutions), some assume it is uniform but not smooth studying galaxy clusters, where charged particles
(the Lemaître-Tolman-Bondi solutions) and some divert photons of light from their original path,
assume it is neither. One idea, called the swiss-cheese sometimes sending them hurtling towards Earth.
model, excavates spherical holes dotted across CMB photons that are scattered in this way can
the universe and fills them with black holes. give us a rough picture of what the CMB looks like to
No one knows if these far more complicated a hypothetical observer at that galaxy cluster. If our
solutions can match up to the intricate map of the vantage from Earth is nothing special, then the CMB
universe we already have, however. Switching to an would look the same to them. If it doesn’t, we might
entirely new cosmological framework would require have to put the cosmological principle to one side. ❚

58 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 MAGNETIC
or decades, it has been thought
that only gravity has what it takes
to sculpt the wonders of the universe.
But experiments are throwing up hints

COSMOS
that we may have wrongly dismissed the
influence of another force: magnetism.
Gravity had made the early running
because, although it is a relatively weak
force, it acts over vast distances and pulls
on all matter. Magnetism wasn’t on the
After decades of debate, the idea that table, being a more limited force that only affects
magnetism helped shape the universe electrically charged particles. In the middle of the 20th
century, however, physicist Hannes Alfvén pointed out
is becoming difficult to ignore. that much of the stuff in the universe is in a state of
matter called plasma, a gas made of charged particles.
He suggested that the force exerted on plasma by
magnetism ought to be at least comparable with
the effect of gravity on other matter. Magnetic fields
must, he reckoned, play an important – perhaps
even dominant – role in shaping the cosmos.
Alfvén’s backers began devising hypothetical
magnetism-based solutions to several cosmic
conundrums, including how spiral galaxies get their
shape. But there were always two big problems for
those in magnetism’s corner. First, it was hard to test
the idea because, at the time, there was no practical
way of observing magnetic fields in the wider universe.
Second, and more fundamentally, a magnetic field
would have to acquire extraordinary strength to play
a role in shaping galaxies and no one had any idea of
how a sufficiently strong field could be formed.
To create a magnetic field, you first need a dynamo,
a churning region of charged, electrically conducting
material. This is what happens inside Earth: liquid
metal circulates to produce the magnetic field that
surrounds our planet. A dynamo made of plasma
could certainly have formed in the early universe.
DARIAREN/ISTOCK

The trouble is, any such dynamo would be relatively

small fry, generating magnetic fields far too weak to do
any real galactic shaping. Something would have had >

Chapter 4 | The seeds of revolution | 59

to somehow amplify those nascent fields many extraordinary: the magnetic field was clearly following
times – and no one had any sensible suggestions the spiral pattern of the galaxy. Gravity didn’t predict
for how that could have happened. Arguments about anything like this. To find out if this was a fluke,
what, if any, role magnetism played in shaping the they looked at 20 other nearby galaxies. So far,
cosmos simmered for decades. But by the 1980s, every single one has a large-scale magnetic field
with no answers to these two problems, magnetism permeating the whole galaxy. And these fields
was deemed to have lost. Gravity really was the all follow the shape of the spiral arms too.
one true sculptor of the universe. Other telescopes have seen similar things. In 2020,
Gravity certainly can’t explain every detail of the Yelena Stein, now at the German Aerospace Centre
structure of the universe. One puzzle involves galaxy in Cologne, and her colleagues used the Very Large
clusters, which, as well as the galaxies themselves and Array – a radio telescope in New Mexico – to study
(presumably) some dark matter, contain relatively the spiral galaxy NGC 4217. They detected a large-scale
empty areas called the intracluster medium, in magnetic field permeating the galaxy.
which there is nothing but plasma. This plasma On their own, these observations are hardly
emits X-rays, which we can measure from Earth conclusive. The magnetic fields could be a side
and so infer its temperature. Since the late 1990s, effect of the spiral shape rather than a cause of it.
astronomers have been finding that the plasmas And the reasons for ruling out magnetic fields as
inside galaxy clusters are inexplicably hot, at cosmic sculptors weren’t just that we hadn’t seen
10 million °C. According to gravitational physics, them, but that we didn’t understand how they
the gas should have radiated away that heat long ago. could be sufficiently large.
Although this particular puzzle didn’t immediately Now, however, that second objection might
turn astronomers back towards magnetism, some be crumbling too. Ever since the mid-1950s, when
researchers have recently been wondering if we were geophysicist Stanislav Braginsky wrote down his
too hasty to dismiss the force so completely from equations of fluid motion in a plasma, researchers
cosmology. One thing that has changed since the have been interested in the role of turbulence – chaotic
1980s is our ability to look for magnetic fields in changes in pressure and flow – in the generation
the universe. For example, NASA’s Stratospheric of a magnetic field. One idea that emerged was that
Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) turbulence within the plasma could affect the properties
instrument, an infrared telescope housed in a of the magnetic field generated. Turbulence is inherently
converted jumbo jet that can soar high into the complicated and it was impossible to understand
atmosphere. It climbs above the water vapour in the what effects it might have until the advent of modern
air, which absorbs infrared light and stymies most computer simulations. But these have shown that
infrared observations attempted from the ground. a “turbulent dynamo”, as it is known, should hugely
When cosmic dust grains find themselves in a boost a magnetic field’s strength. Still, these effects
magnetic field, they line up like a picket fence, which would only become easy to observe in a plasma heated
polarises any infrared light passing through them. to extreme temperatures – the sort present during
Enrique Lopez Rodriguez at Stanford University in the early universe – which meant this was a tough
California happened to be working with SOFIA five hypothesis to experimentally test.
years ago when the researchers were commissioning a However, an international team of plasma physicists
new instrument that could pick up these signals and so has shown, using the world’s most powerful laser
reveal magnetic fields. He suggested they observe the apparatus, the National Ignition Facility at Lawrence
spiral galaxy NGC 1068, the core of which was known Livermore National Laboratory in California, that
to be a source of polarised infrared light. In the first magnetic fields can contain enough energy that they
30 minutes of the observation, they saw something can tell matter how to move – just as gravity does. ❚

60 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

WAVE HELLO
Our new ability to detect gravitational waves is a game-changer,
helping us solve riddles about the evolution of galaxies and black holes.

MAGINE dropping a pebble into a pond and of colliding black holes. But with so many gravitational
watching the ripples spread out in concentric waves now in the bag, we are in a new era, one in
circles. A gravitational wave is a bit like this, which we can answer questions about how the
except instead of a pebble, we have massive, universe works on the grandest scales.
moving objects like black holes, and instead Perhaps more than any other class of celestial object,
of water, the ripples are in space-time itself and black holes mark out the history of the cosmos. They
propagate in three dimensions. These waves come in a variety of sizes and are formed in different
were one of the last unverified predictions of ways over the life of the universe. There are stellar black
Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity. holes, which are born when giant stars die and have
To snare them, physicists built two masses from several times to tens of times that of the
gigantic instruments in the US that are collectively sun. Then there are supermassive black holes, which
known as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave can be anywhere from a few million to a billion solar
Observatory, or LIGO. These detectors each fire two masses. These live in the centres of galaxies and are
precision lasers in different directions from a central thought to have formed as smaller black holes merged.
starting point at mirrors that are several kilometres Our understanding of how these types of black hole
away. The path the beams take is the same length, grow and relate to each other is, however, riddled with
so any slight difference in when they arrive back at confusion. One major puzzle is the mass gap between
the origin indicates a change in the space they have the smallest black holes and the largest neutron stars.
traversed – a sign of a gravitational wave swooshing Neutron stars are the collapsed cores of dead stars
through Earth, stretching and squashing space. and the second most dense objects in the universe; a
Detecting these ripples isn’t easy, given thimbleful of neutron star weighs hundreds of millions
that gravitational waves change space by much of tonnes. It is thought that these stars can reach a point
less than the width of a subatomic particle. But the of such density that they collapse into a black hole.
LIGO team succeeded. These days, there are another If this is true, then the lightest black holes should have
three similar detectors: Virgo in Italy, the Kamioka about the same mass as the heaviest neutron stars.
Gravitational Wave Detector (KAGRA) in Japan But that isn’t what we see. Even before LIGO,
and GEO600 in Germany. we had ways of estimating the mass of black holes
The most useful thing about this groundbreaking and neutron stars. These suggested that the heaviest
work is that it gives us a window on black holes, neutron stars got no heavier than about twice the
objects that are otherwise tricky to study. Unlike mass of the sun, while the lightest black holes were
stars or planets, black holes don’t directly give out or no lighter than about five solar masses. In 2010, Feryal
reflect light. But they do sometimes crash into each Özel at the University of Arizona called attention to
other, creating waves in the fabric of space-time. the paucity of objects of two to five stellar masses,
At first, there was a thrill in just hearing the “chirp” sparking debate about whether we had seriously >

Chapter 4 | The seeds of revolution | 61

 PETERSCHREIBER.MEDIA/ISTOCK
misunderstood neutron stars. In the first few years black holes – the ones that are millions of times heavier
after LIGO was switched on, we still didn’t see than the sun – could tell us more about cosmic history.
anything definitive in this “mass gap”. Today, one of these behemoths sits at the centre of pretty
But that has changed. There have now been at least much every galaxy, providing the gravity glueing its
two events in which a black hole swallowed some stars together. To get to their present sizes, older,
smaller object – another black hole or a neutron star, smaller galaxies and their supermassive black holes
we can’t be sure which – that weighed in at 2.6 solar must have merged. But we have never been able to
masses, squarely within the mass gap. A third sighting peer far enough back in time to see this happen.
from LIGO caught a black hole eating a 2.1-solar-mass These colliding supermassive black holes would have
neutron star. Meanwhile, Thankful Cromartie at given off gravitational waves. But the actual collisions
Cornell University in New York spotted a neutron star are expected to be rare, and because the orbital speeds
that was 2.19 solar masses using radio telescopes. Mass- would be low, the waves would have lower frequencies
gap objects are out there, they are just hard to spot. than those observed up until now. A LIGO-style detector
There are also surprises when it comes to the would never be sensitive enough to see them.
most gigantic stellar black holes. The heaviest stars But there is another way. Even before they
yet discovered are more than 200 times the mass of merge, orbiting supermassive black holes give out
the sun. But when one of these stars dies, we think the weak gravitational waves. Individually, these are
explosion is so powerful that nothing is left, not even a insignificant, but when combined with those being
black hole. In fact, according to our best understanding given out by all other such black hole pairs across the
of these events, no black hole heavier than about universe, they add up to an incessant, infinitesimal
45 solar masses should be created from a supernova, burbling of space-time that criss-crosses the cosmos.
no matter how massive the star was. It is known as the gravitational wave background.
But LIGO is detecting black holes that tip the This background is actually a million or more times
scales at 60 solar masses and beyond. Even accounting “louder” than the LIGO signals, but a full wave undulation
for the bias of the detector towards heavy objects, lasts for years. Detecting it would mean measuring
there are more of these monsters than expected. an oscillation that is still far less than the width of
This might be telling us that we have misunderstood an atom and takes place over the course of years.
supernovae, or perhaps that black holes grow to The North American Nanohertz Observatory
such sizes by merging with each other. for Gravitational Waves (NANOGrav) project aims
Using gravitational waves to study the supermassive to measure this signal. NANOGrav uses conventional

62 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

“A thimbleful of neutron
star weighs hundreds
of millions of tonnes”

radio telescopes to monitor fast-spinning neutron stars mean that we will be forced to invoke another type
called pulsars. As they rotate, pulsars send out regular of black hole entirely to balance the books.
beams of radio waves into space, like a lighthouse, In some interpretations of the big bang, fluctuations
which serve as extremely stable clocks. NANOGrav has in the density of space in the first seconds of the
been timing signals from dozens of pulsars across the universe could have produced tiny black holes. It is
sky for more than a decade. Any tiny discrepancies in far from certain whether these so-called primordial
when the flashes arrive here could be a sign of the black holes existed, or if they are still out there. But if
ripples of the gravitational wave background. they are, they provide an elegant solution to several
In 2020, the NANOGrav researchers announced problems in cosmology. Most appealingly, they could
an analysis of almost 13 years of data for 45 pulsars. be the secret identity of dark matter, the invisible
In it, they saw hints of a signal that could be the stuff thought to be guiding the motion of galaxies.
background. They haven’t yet resolved the signal According to Suvodip Mukherjee at the Perimeter
well enough to be sure, but the NANOGrav team has Institute in Waterloo, Canada, the gravitational wave
since combined its data with that of two similar pulsar background could provide us with the first concrete
timing arrays in Europe and Australia to form the evidence of primordial black holes. “I find this
International Pulsar Timing Array collaboration. possibility very fascinating,” says Mukherjee. He and
This triumvirate subsequently announced that in his colleague Joseph Silk at Johns Hopkins University
the combined data set, the signal stayed put, providing in Maryland recently showed that it should be possible
a stronger suggestion that this is no false alarm. to distinguish regular and primordial black holes in
Even if this is the real deal, it won’t be possible to the gravitational wave background.
deduce anything about individual supermassive black First, though, we must unambiguously detect
holes. Instead, astronomers would model versions the background signal. To that end, the NANOGrav
of the universe in computers, each with different team is analysing another three years of data from
populations of giant black holes and varying merger almost 60 pulsars. This should tell us for sure whether
rates, and see what kind of gravitational background we are seeing the gravitational wave background. But
signal should be produced. By comparing the models as our first detection of gravitational waves taught us,
and the real data, we should be able to deduce a lot that will be only the beginning. “It’s not going to end
about the kinds of black holes out there in the cosmos. once we say we’ve detected the gravitational wave
The most exciting prospect would be if the computer background,” says Cromartie. “That’s when our
models couldn’t be made to fit the data. This might science really starts.” ❚

Chapter 4 | The seeds of revolution | 63

CHAPTER 5

64 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

Not many objects in the cosmos deserve their own chapter,
but black holes really are something special. Albert Einstein
once dismissed them as purely theoretical objects. Now,
though, we know that they do exist, swallowing everything
in their cosmic neighbourhood.

But black holes are far more than extreme destroyers.

Cosmologists are finding that they may play many vital
roles in their theories of the universe – and that by studying
them we might glimpse a final theory of physics.

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 65

 INTERVIEW

KEYS TO
THE COSMOS
Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw confront the black hole
information paradox – and what it reveals about the
deepest structure of the universe.

black hole is a region of space so Why are black holes important to particle physicists?
dense that nothing, not even light, Jeff Forshaw: Black holes are places where quantum
can move quickly enough to escape. physics and general relativity are both relevant,
At least that was the thinking until and yet we can’t describe, in a consistent way,
the 1970s, when Stephen Hawking what happens when black holes evaporate.
calculated that black holes aren’t So, something has got to give. Either quantum
completely black after all. Instead, mechanics or general relativity is wrong.
Hawking argued, they slowly
give off radiation – now known Brian Cox: A key point, as well, is that this clash
as Hawking radiation – that between quantum mechanics and general relativity
eventually means the black hole will evaporate. happens in the vicinity of the event horizon of a
Hawking’s calculations created a problem. Quantum black hole, the boundary beyond which light cannot
theory says information can never vanish, so what escape. It’s been known for a long time that you would
happens to the information that has fallen into the black need quantum gravity to explain what happens at a
hole? Where does it go? This is the black hole information singularity, the point deep inside a black hole where
paradox. It has troubled physicists for decades because the curvature of space-time becomes so ludicrously
it highlights the profound disconnect between general extreme and gravity so strong that the equations
relativity, Albert Einstein’s theory of gravity from which of general relativity break down. Everything you
black holes were summoned, and the laws of quantum calculate just goes to infinity.
theory that govern the subatomic realm. The real treasure here, though, is that the
NASA/CXC/M. WEISS

But it also shows us just what we stand to gain if clash comes in a region where you can’t just
we can make sense of these monstrous inhabitants of throw your hands up and say “it’s something to
our universe. For Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw, the black do with the singularity, so just forget about it”. It’s
hole holds the key to the biggest mysteries in physics. a region where gravity is not ludicrously strong, >

66 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 An artist’s impression of a star
spiralling towards a black hole’s
event horizon, beyond which
light is unable to escape

PROFILE
BRIAN COX AND
JEFF FORSHAW
JEFF FORSHAW is a professor
of physics at the University
of Manchester in the UK.
He spends his time trying to
figure out what the data from
the world’s particle physics
experiments is telling us about
the fundamental constituents
of matter and their interactions
with each other.

BRIAN COX is also a professor

of physics at the University
of Manchester, as well as
being one of the best-known
presenters of television
science programmes.

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 67

so we don’t expect to need quantum gravity. But not everyone agreed with Hawking. What happened?
JF: The theorists Gerard ‘t Hooft and Leonard Susskind
When he first highlighted this clash, Hawking went against said: “Well, let’s suppose that the information does
quantum theory by suggesting that radiation escapes come out and quantum mechanics is good.”
from a black hole and that the information it carries Then you’ve got a real problem. The information
disappears. What do we mean by information here? is coming out from the black hole, but things
JF: Imagine everything that falls into a black hole. fall through the horizon of a black hole into the
You could describe it with a long binary sequence singularity. There’s no mechanism to get anything
of ones and zeros, or bits. And if you’ve got an from the singularity back out again.
algorithm that decodes that, it will tell you what What they realised is that, from the point of
fell in. The information is the smallest binary string view of somebody always outside of the black hole,
of bits that is sufficient to completely tell you about nothing ever actually falls through the horizon.
the thing that fell in, whether it’s a book or a bunch Everything freezes on it, in the sense that it stops.
of quantum bits or, you know, a star collapsing. Actually, it’s a very hot membrane and anything
that falls on it kind of evaporates off.
←- If I throw a book into a black hole, from my
For more about how black holes form,- external perspective, it gets obliterated and burned
see The Grandest Tour in Chapter 1- up and spread all over the horizon, then comes back
out as Hawking radiation. But from the point of view of
BC: This is determinism, which is central to physics. the book, it just falls through the horizon. We could be
If you know everything about a system at one point, falling through the horizon of a black hole now, it’s a
then you can predict what it’s going to do in the totally benign experience.
future and what it was doing in the past.
So does the book fall in or does it stay on the horizon?
So what happens to the information when radiation JF: What ‘t Hooft and Susskind said is that,
escapes a black hole? actually, both happen. This is what is called black
BC: If information is preserved, then, in principle, hole complementarity. It’s the idea that information
you could collect all the Hawking radiation and simultaneously gets reflected off the black hole
process it in some way. You could wind time back to and falls smoothly through that horizon.
reconstruct what kind of star collapsed to form the
black hole, for example. But that did not appear to be BC: They’re two perfectly legitimate views of the
the case because, in Hawking’s original calculation, same thing. Now, modern calculations are showing
there is no information in the radiation at all. that this picture is largely correct. Both are legitimate
views. Immediately, you can see that challenges our
JF: The Hawking calculation said that there’s no notion of what reality is. How can something have
algorithm that could possibly extract any message two apparently different fates?
from that radiation. That was Hawking’s original
calculation – that information is obliterated So what actually happens to the information, and what
in a black hole, which violates a key property of does that tell us about reality?
quantum mechanics – that information is conserved, JF: The first thing you might think would be
and suggests that quantum theory is wrong. that the information gets copied on the horizon,

68 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 Susskind brought forward with complementarity.
You’ve got the interior space being encoded on the
boundary, rather like the information inside of a
black hole being encoded on its horizon.

All of which suggests space-time is emergent, but what

is it emerging from, exactly, and how?
JF: It’s become clear over the past decade that
entanglement is a key feature. Basically, think of
the surface of the ball as lots of entangled particles.
For every entangled link, think of a little quantum
wormhole. There’s a correspondence between
entanglement and wormholes – it is as if many-
particle entanglement can be thought of in terms
of a network of wormholes that weave space-time.
NABIL NEZZAR

BC: We’re discovering a deeper structure, which

doesn’t have space and time in it. And you might say:
“Which one is the real description, then? Is it the
thing on the boundary or the space inside?” As far
so there are two versions. But again, that’s not allowed as I’m aware, nobody really gets into that discussion.
in quantum mechanics. That pushed ‘t Hooft and These are equivalent descriptions of the physics.
Susskind into this idea of holography. They supposed Who are we to say which is a deeper picture?
that the information in any region of space is encoded
on the boundary of that region of space. Key to this What does this mean for reality as we know it?
is quantum entanglement, a very non-intuitive JF: We picture ourselves as being local. Our experience
connection that can be created between two or of the world is that we deal with local objects
more particles. If you cut out a little chunk of space, interacting locally with each other. But it appears
then the entanglement with the rest of the universe that there is an equivalent description, which
would be sufficient to completely encode for what’s is highly non-local. That already shatters your
happening inside that region. perception of what you think you are, right?
Later, Juan Maldacena at the Institute for Advanced Space is not fundamental, it is emergent. All that
Study in Princeton discovered that a particular region really exists is information. Space and time emerge
of space-time has a completely equivalent description from a bunch of entangled quantum units that have
on the boundary of that space-time in terms of a logical relationships with each other. These units
quantum field theory, which describes the movements interact with each other quantum mechanically.
of subatomic particles. Think of it like the surface of a And the result of that is the universe we live in.
ball that encodes for general relativity in the interior.
In one description of what’s happening, there is no BC: We really do seem to be saying that space and
interior space, it is just the surface. That is also an time emerge from something deeper, which is
explicit demonstration of the ideas that ‘t Hooft and absolutely fundamental. ❚

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 69

THE BLACK HOLE
NEXT DOOR
Build a laboratory model of a black hole and you might find yourself
solving the secrets of space-time or recreating the big bang.

ORMALLY, gravity is a weak force. But elsewhere? In 1981, physicist Bill Unruh at the University
pile more and more matter into a small of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, came up with
volume and space-time can be bent into the idea of making a laboratory model of a black hole to
the bottomless chasm that is a black see if it might produce an analogue of Hawking radiation.
hole. Anything that strays too close, After all, space-time is a bit like a fluid and quantum fields
past a threshold known as the event are like waves, so it ought to be possible to create waves
horizon, will fall in and never get out. in a liquid that are analogous to Hawking radiation.
We know that black holes are common, Unruh’s proposal inspired many physicists to
littering our galaxy by the million. make such models. Start with a fluid, which represents
Yet they remain poorly understood. space-time – say, water pumped steadily along a tank.
One of the strangest predictions about them came Then modify the flow by, for example, inserting
from physicist Stephen Hawking. Back in the 1970s, an obstacle. The effect is like warping space-time.
he was thinking about black holes and the empty If the change in current is strong enough, one side
vacuum of outer space in the context of quantum of the obstacle acts as a black hole, so that water waves
mechanics. This theory treats a vacuum as a froth of travelling towards it can’t travel fast enough to rebound
low-level quantum fields: not quite nothing, not quite backwards again. Meanwhile, on the other side, waves
something. Hawking showed that a black hole makes can’t get past the obstacle in the first place. Here, the
this picture even weirder. It compresses the vacuum obstacle acts like the theoretical opposite of a black
quantum fields, making them strong enough to hole, a white hole, into which nothing can enter.
manifest as proper matter and radiation. Inside the Except, that is, for the gaze of the experimenter – and
event horizon, the negative component of the field, herein lies an important distinction between analogue
which is associated with antiparticles, predominates; black holes and the real thing. Analogue black holes
outside, the positive component, made of particles, have horizons – points of no return for water waves
can radiate away. In short, Hawking predicted that and other things whose maximum speed is low – but
black holes aren’t totally black: they glow. not event horizons, which are impassable for absolutely
Ever since, theorists have been beguiled by everything, including the fastest thing of all, light.
this hypothetical glow, called Hawking radiation. When Germain Rousseaux and his colleagues at
No one has ever detected it from a real black hole the Institut Pprime in Poitiers, France, created one
and it is likely that no one ever will, because it is of their first analogues in 2008, they did see a hint of
predicted to be so incredibly faint. something akin to Hawking radiation. They focused on
Still, could there be a way to find evidence of it the white hole horizon because, for technical reasons,

70 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

 A space-time analogue made of
liquid at the Gravity Laboratory
at the University of Nottingham
LEONARDO SOLIDORO/GRAVITY LABORATORY

Jeff Steinhauer’s black

hole analogue involves
supercooled rubidium

it is easier to study water that is slowing down than

speeding up. When those waves approached the white
hole’s horizon, they didn’t crawl to a stop, as you would
expect. Instead, some bounced back, inverted. In these
reflections, the propagating crests and troughs had
switched places; mathematically speaking, their
relative frequency seemed to turn from positive
to negative. As Hawking’s equations predicted, the
PROF. JEFF STEINHAUER

outside of the white hole’s horizon had generated a

negative field – in this case, one made of water waves.
Rousseaux worried that what he saw was a false
signal, a type of harmonic wave that big enough waves
can generate by themselves. But within a year or so,
several other groups were working on analogue black
Germain Rousseaux’s and white holes. By 2016, Rousseaux had built a refined
experiment uses flowing set-up that generated waves just a couple of millimetres
water to simulate black holes tall, small enough to avoid harmonics, and had seen
the same Hawking radiation-like effects.
Meanwhile, Ulf Leonhardt, an early collaborator
of Rousseaux’s who is now at the Weizmann Institute
of Science in Rehovot, Israel, had been pioneering
space-time analogues in a seemingly very different
medium: optical fibres. Here, space-time is represented
by light travelling through the fibres, and of course
light is composed of electromagnetic waves. The
“obstacle” in this case is a separate laser pulse that
warps the properties of the fibres, making the light
GERMAIN ROUSSEAUX

slow. In 2019, Leonhardt’s team used this approach

to create an optical white hole horizon clearly
flanked by positive and negative light fields.
Not far away, at the Technion – Israel Institute of >

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 71

Technology in Haifa, Jeff Steinhauer has developed a tiny puddle of potassium superfluid and used
yet another approach. He takes a microscopic drop magnetic fields to tweak the speed with which waves
of rubidium and cools it to almost absolute zero, rippled outwards from the centre. By tweaking them
whereupon it becomes a superfluid that has strange just so, the waves slowed until they never reached the
quantum properties. At such low temperatures, outside at all – a curious effect that mimicked what
vibrations almost completely cease, making happened during inflation. Oberthaler’s experiment
observations much easier. The blast of a laser doesn’t prove inflation really happened, of course.
punctures the drop like a black hole; the atoms But Silke Weinfurtner at the University of Nottingham
fall so fast that they exceed the speed of sound, in the UK calls analogues such as these a “first glimpse”
emitting positive and negative waves in either of how lab experiments could provide insights into
direction. In 2016, Steinhauer patiently recorded the the nature of the very early universe, which, until
correlations between these waves, until he convinced now, has been the domain of theory alone.
himself they were just like Hawking radiation. Weinfurtner is already exploring further. In her
These days, the field of gravity analogues is “gravity laboratory”, she is surrounded by futuristic
highly competitive, and the nuances of what the glass cauldrons of liquids, illuminated orange and
experiments really show are often questioned by green by lasers that measure the waves within them.
rival researchers. What everyone in the field agrees on, In one experiment, she is looking at another prediction
however, is that Hawking radiation is far more general of modern cosmology. After inflation, primordial
than Hawking himself realised. In any medium that quantum fields are thought to have fed off one another
can host waves and have them pass through a horizon, to create “spikes” that manifested as real matter. Last
you should see new waves, positive and negative, year, Weinfurtner and her colleagues mounted a vessel
emitted from either side of the horizon. “Hawking on a shaking platform to simulate this cosmic period
radiation has the same derivation in any system – and found that the waves interacted with one another
it’s universal,” says David Bermudez, a theorist at to the same degree as predicted by theory.
the Center for Research and Advanced Studies of For Weinfurtner, the question isn’t whether
the National Polytechnic Institute in Mexico City. universe analogues correctly mimic the real universe
Buoyed by this, researchers are now being bolder in all respects, but whether they can reveal nuances
and making analogues of other extreme aspects beyond the scope of theory. After all, theories tend
of space-time. Markus Oberthaler at Heidelberg to reduce the complexity of the universe to a fixed
University in Germany, for example, has been looking number of parameters. There is a chance that analogue
at how the universe began. Modern cosmology predicts experiments will give physicists a better idea of what
that, in its first moments, the universe saw a faster- to look for in the real, messy world to confirm their
than-light expansion known as inflation. This would hypotheses. “That the equations governing our
have stretched out primordial quantum fields so analogues are not quite the same as the real thing
that their tiny fluctuations seeded the humongous disturbs a lot of people, but actually it makes it really
structures, such as galaxies, that we see today. interesting,” she says. “Can we simulate beyond
To model this, Oberthaler and his team took what we can calculate?”

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 COSMIC
One area where this might play out connects back
to Hawking radiation. It is predicted to appear to us
as faint radio waves, but that is after it has undergone
stretching to escape the black hole’s gravity. When first

MEMORIES
emitted, it must have had an infinitesimally small
wavelength. But the rules of quantum mechanics
don’t permit such boundless reduction. There is
no accepted solution to this paradox.
In analogue black holes, there are none of
these impossible wavelength shifts to fret over. Observing the space-time vibrations
In the vacuum of space, light is supposed to always
travel at the same speed. But in nearly all materials – created in the cataclysmic collisions
including the water in Rousseaux’s tanks – the speed between black holes could show
of light depends on its wavelength. In practice, then,
a wavelength can never be zero because the speed us an alternative theory of gravity.
of the ray would change to prevent that.
This could be seen as a deficiency of analogue
gravities. Or, says Leonhardt, it could be that the HEN black holes collide
theory describing real space is what is at fault. in the distant reaches of the
Maybe the speed of light in a vacuum isn’t always universe, they release energy
a constant. Maybe, at the smallest quantum scales, in the form of gravitational
it changes – keeping the wavelength of astrophysical waves. You can picture these
Hawking radiation within quantum bounds. passing through space-time
Since no one has ever directly observed a real like the ripples a dropped
black hole, ultimately we can never be sure that pebble creates on the
analogue black holes are a good guide to the real surface of a pond.
thing. But for Leonhardt, the fact that gravitational You might imagine that
phenomena can be seen in fluids, optical fibres and after the gravitational wave has passed, the fabric of
other media is no accident. Maybe the reverse is the universe returns to normal. But it doesn’t. Albert
also true: maybe space-time behaves more like an Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which says that
everyday material than we usually care to think. gravity results from mass warping space-time, predicts
For decades, many cosmologists have placed that gravitational waves should ever-so-subtly shift
their hope in ever more abstract theories and colossal the structure of space-time in their wake. In other
experiments. The idea that progress could instead come words, the universe remembers.
from humble apparatus like tanks of water is, for many, If confirmed, this “gravitational memory” would be
a stretch. But, as Einstein showed, sometimes progress evidence of a hidden form of symmetry that is thought
requires abandoning deeply held convictions. ❚ to saturate the whole universe. This, in turn, would >

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 73

provide vital and potentially decisive clues about GRAVITATIONAL
a quantum theory of gravity – and what space-time MEMORY
is ultimately made of.
In the late 1960s, calculations revealed that
particles vibrated by gravitational waves don’t return
to their original locations. Instead, their positions are
shifted by a minuscule amount. This happens because
space-time, which combines the three dimensions
of space with one of time into a four-dimensional
fabric, is permanently stretched in one direction
and squeezed in another by the gravitational wave.

←-
Find out more about space-time by- SOFT SUPERTRANSLATION
turning back to Chapter 1- PARTICLES SYMMETRIES

Back then, the idea that we might detect such

waves was a moonshot, let alone this far weaker THE INFRARED TRIANGLE
distortion of space-time. Over the next few decades, This mathematical connection links three seemingly
most physicists didn’t give gravitational memory a disparate aspects of reality. Gravitational memory,
second thought. Even in 2016, when the international which sits on one corner, is the physical manifestation
collaboration behind the Laser Interferometer of the other two corners. These corners, in turn, describe
Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) in the US quantum particles and a special set of symmetries linked
announced the discovery of gravitational waves, to gravity that show up even in empty space-time. This
the idea that we might someday see gravitational connection between the bottom corners of the triangle
memory seemed a stretch. means that quantum gravity, whatever it is, must obey
However, after upgrades to LIGO, Virgo and the supertranslation symmetries.
Kamioka Gravitational Wave Detector in Japan, the
milestone is within reach. Experimentalists are hoping
they will detect gravitational memory within a few years.
That would be yet another confirmation of
the predictions of Einstein’s theory of gravity.
Paradoxically, however, it could also help to

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“Any black holes that didn’t
obey general relativity
would be hairy”
demonstrate that it has its limits: gravitational as if there is a residual effect of gravity even when
memory could show how the black holes predicted there is no matter around. These supertranslation
by general relativity aren’t the black holes we see. symmetries, as they are known, can be described
Such a discrepancy could reveal itself in the using the same mathematics used to describe
very final moments of a merger between two black gravitational memory – in other words, they are
holes, as they orbit each other in a spiral before one and the same. So, an observation of gravitational
finally becoming one. The resulting black hole starts memory would be a spectacular confirmation that
“ringing” – another way of saying it is wobbling about supertranslational symmetries exist.
because of the collision – before it settles down to being What makes this connection particularly intriguing
a normal, well-behaved black hole, emitting some when it comes to quantum gravity is that gravitational
more gravitational waves in the process. From those memory and supertranslational symmetries can be
gravitational waves, we can detect the shape of a black connected to a third, seemingly disparate part of
hole’s “ringdown”. And this will be slightly different reality: quantum particles with zero energy, known
depending on whether black holes obey the laws of as soft particles. The way soft particles collide can be
general relativity or an alternative theory of gravity. described by the same equations that govern colliding
In general relativity, black holes are described by black holes that produce gravitational memory.
two numbers: their mass and their spin. Anything This is the third corner of what is known as the
beyond these two parameters is known as “hair”, infrared triangle: a mathematical connection that
so any black holes that didn’t obey general relativity essentially says the soft particle theorems are equivalent
would be hairy. That means hairy black holes would to the supertranslation symmetries and to gravitational
ring differently from bald black holes. memory. That is a big deal because each corner of the
If researchers can find that black holes are hairy, it triangle brings something to the table that helps us
would be the clearest sign so far that general relativity understand something about the others. While the
must be replaced by a theory of quantum gravity. This symmetries are intuitive, the soft particle theorems
would unify gravity with the other forces of nature, are mathematically precise. “With gravitational
which are described by quantum mechanics. What memory,” says Andrew Strominger, who pioneered
this quantum gravity might look like is far from clear, this work, “you connect it to observable reality.”
and experiments are yet to yield many clues. But In short, this triangle suggests that any quantum
gravitational memory offers hope on this front too. theory of gravity must obey supertranslation
Instead of having a structure like a rigid crystal, symmetries. It is hard to find a theory that does this,
with its three symmetries, empty space-time has which should help theorists to narrow their search.
an infinite collection of symmetries linked to gravity. “It doesn’t tell us what quantum gravity is, but it’s
These persist far from gravitational influence, however, going to help,” says astrophysicist Paul Lasky. ❚

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 75

ESSAY

THE Black holes that are older than our

universe? It sounds like madness. But
it isn’t, says cosmologist Bernard Carr.

ANCIENT And if we can find them, they might

tell us what came before the big bang.

ONES HEN I started my career,

more than 50 years ago,
no one was sure that black
holes existed. Today, there
is no longer any doubt.
We know they form from
collapsing stars and that
supermassive ones sit at the
centres of galaxies. We have
even taken a picture of two
of them. But an important open question remains:
could smaller black holes have formed in the early
universe, shortly after the big bang?
The question matters more than you might think.
PROFILE Back in the 1970s, I was working on this idea under
the supervision of Stephen Hawking, who had started
BERNARD to think about the possibility of these “primordial
CARR black holes” just a few years before. Our work together
set the trajectory of my career. We still don’t know if
Bernard Carr is an they formed, but there are good reasons to think they
emeritus professor might have. What’s more, some of them could still be
around today and, excitingly, they could be the answer
of mathematics and
to a whole range of cosmological conundrums.
astronomy at Queen On top of that, there is an even more exotic
Mary University of possibility: that some black holes could be older
London. For decades, than the universe itself. It is a wild idea, but not
he collaborated with inconceivable. And new research suggests that we
Stephen Hawking in might one day be able to positively identify them,
a breakthrough that would radically change our
studies of black holes.
understanding of cosmology.
Most cosmologists would claim that all the matter
and energy that permeates our universe today came

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 universe started with a big bounce. Instead of everything
springing into existence in one moment, a big bounce
would be the result of a previous, collapsing universe
starting to expand again. This is a kind of big bang, but
without a singularity, as the universe always has a finite
density. The bouncing scenario is compatible with
certain attempts at uniting the laws of physics, such as
some models of quantum cosmology, loop quantum
gravity and some alternative theories of gravity.
If our universe came from a bounce, it might end
ESA/HUBBLE, DSS, NICK RISINGER, N. BARTMANN

in one too. This kind of recurring bounce, where the

universe goes through periods of expansion and
compression, is called a cyclic universe. It only applies
if the universe is destined to recollapse and this, in turn,
depends on the nature of dark energy, the mysterious
force causing the universe to fly apart faster and faster.
Nevertheless, if we found evidence for these bouncing
and cyclic models, it would have huge implications,
both for how the universe began and how it might end.
Finding this evidence is tricky, partly because
We’re not certain everything that would have existed in the previous
how supermassive universe is likely to have been destroyed when it
black holes formed collapsed. Or would it? I think there is a chance that
some black holes from a previous universe may have
into existence in a single moment 13.8 billion years survived the big bounce and still be around today.
ago that we call the big bang. After that, there was a The idea that black holes may have formed in the
period when the universe grew exponentially fast, early universe dates to the early 1970s. Stephen and I
called cosmic inflation, before it settled down to had been considering whether black holes could form
a gentler expansion. from density fluctuations near the big bang. From our
calculations, that did indeed seem possible. But there
←- was a snag. A few years earlier, Russian researchers
For more about inflation and the- Yakov Zeldovich and Igor Novikov had shown any black
big bang, see Chapter 2- holes formed in the early universe would grow rapidly,
reaching an enormous mass today. This was ruled out
One problem with this picture is that we don’t know with observations – we would have seen the effects of
for sure what happened at the big bang. It is often such black holes, so they concluded that primordial
described as a singularity – a point of infinite density – black holes never formed.
and Albert Einstein’s general relativity, our best My first paper with Stephen showed this result
description of gravity, breaks down at a singularity. was wrong. After many days of calculation, I rushed
As a result, we can’t describe it with the usual excitedly to his office to give the good news: because
equations that make sense of reality. of the expansion of the universe, which the pair hadn’t
This has led some cosmologists to speculate that the considered, primordial black holes wouldn’t grow >

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 77

much at all. I was rather deflated to find Stephen had just potentially explain dark matter, the mysterious
come to the same conclusion, independently, by doing stuff that keeps galaxies from flying apart, or the
the calculation in his head. Nevertheless, we agreed: origins of supermassive black holes.
primordial black holes may have existed, after all. Later work investigated this in more detail.
Fifty years later, we still haven’t seen any of these In 2016, Jerome Quintin and Robert Brandenberger,
black holes for certain, although some people think both at McGill University in Montreal, Canada,
there are hints of them in detections of ripples in calculated the quantum and thermal fluctuations
space-time called gravitational waves. What we can of a collapsing universe. They found that black holes
say for certain, at least, is that thinking about them can indeed form, albeit only if the universe is
prompted Stephen to discover the radiation that dominated by matter, not radiation.
black holes give off, which we call Hawking radiation, The second possibility is that black holes formed
and the black hole information paradox. in an earlier phase of the previous universe – just like
the black holes that form from the collapse of stars or
↑- galactic nuclei in our universe. In either case, our next
See this chapter’s first section for more on- question was whether the pre-big bang black holes
the black hole information paradox- would survive the bounce and persist into the current
cycle. This depends on the fraction of the volume of
Of course, it would be much more interesting the universe occupied by black holes at the bounce.
if primordial black holes did form, and in recent We reasoned that one could expect black holes to
years there has been a growing interest in the idea. persist if their separation at the bounce was greater
We know that any black holes weighing in at less than than their typical size, because they wouldn’t be
1 trillion kilograms, roughly the mass of a mountain, squeezed together and merge. We concluded that
but the size of a proton, would have evaporated this should be possible in many situations.
by now because of Hawking radiation. But any In 2015, Timothy Clifton, my colleague at Queen
black holes bigger than that would exist today. Mary University of London, along with Coley and
However, there is an even more intriguing myself, made a stab at tackling this question in a more
possibility. A decade or so ago, Alan Coley at mathematically rigorous way. We derived some exact
Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada, and solutions to Einstein’s equations of general relativity,
I became interested in whether we live in a cyclic describing a regular lattice of black holes in a universe
universe. We started to consider whether black holes that undergoes a bounce. Our results indicated there
might have formed in a previous cosmic cycle and are indeed solutions in which multiple black holes
realised there were two possibilities. persist through a bounce.
The first is that they formed due to the high density Later, we also looked into some cosmological
of the previous universe in the final moments of its consequences of this proposal, arguing that pre-big
collapse. This “big crunch” is just like the high-density bang black holes in different mass ranges could
phase in the big bang, but running backwards in time. explain dark matter, provide seeds for galaxies and
So if black holes can form in the big bang, they might perhaps even cause the bounce itself. In the standard
also form in the big crunch. In this case, they would big bang scenario, primordial black holes generated
have a minimum mass determined by the density before inflation would be exponentially diluted, so any
of the universe at the bounce, the time at which the present today are usually assumed to form after inflation,
universe is at its most dense. If this density is small but there is no inflation in some bouncing models.
enough, the black holes could be large enough to Other researchers subsequently elaborated on those

78 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

ideas. In 2018, Carlo Rovelli at Aix-Marseille University These huge black holes range from 1 million to
in France and Francesca Vidotto at Western University 10 billion times the mass of the sun. We know from
in Ontario, Canada, investigated the possibility that looking at the distant universe that they already
dark matter is made up of the remnants of pre-big bang existed very early on – possibly too soon for them
black holes. They argued only a tiny fraction of the to have been created by standard astrophysical
volume of the universe would be outside these black processes. It isn’t clear how they could grow so big,
holes at the bounce, though observers in these regions so fast. One possibility, although not the mainstream
would see a homogeneous universe at later times. view, is that they were seeded by primordial black
An even more exotic possibility is that the holes. In which case, is there some way to figure
bounce squeezes the universe so tightly that all the out if these primordial black holes came from
black holes merge. Even the supermassive black holes a big bang or a big bounce?
we know exist today could lead to this situation, if our Cai and his colleagues modelled the density
universe eventually recollapses. These progressive fluctuations in the inflationary and bounce scenarios
mergers would generate black holes with a hierarchy to compare the two models. They predict that the
of increasing mass until, eventually, the whole number of supermassive black holes would fall off
universe would be turned into a black hole. more steeply with increasing mass in the case of
Nobody knows what would happen in this situation, a bounce. At the moment, we don’t have enough
but work by two groups has recently thrown light data to discriminate between the two scenarios.
on the problem. In 2022, Daniela Pérez and Gustavo But future observations by the James Webb Space
Romero at the Argentine Institute of Radio Astronomy Telescope could provide this.
and, independently, a team led by Maxence Corman
at the Perimeter Institute in Canada, calculated the ←-
behaviour of a single black hole during a bounce. Read all about the JWST-
Although the details of their calculations differ, both in Chapter 4-
groups agree the black hole could survive through the
bounce and that its size may shrink for some period. The existence of primordial black holes formed
This shrinking also raises the possibility that black in this universe is speculative, so the notion of
holes may never completely merge. black holes from a previous universe might seem
All of which is well and good, but what about doubly speculative. Nevertheless, it is important to
finding evidence? Interestingly, another recent explore this possibility, not to mention exhilarating.
study offers some hope that we might one day be Just as thinking about primordial black holes has
able to identify pre-big bang black holes, meaning led to important insights into quantum gravity,
that we could distinguish them from black holes thinking about pre-big bang black holes may lead
formed in our universe. It was led by Yi-Fu Cai at to further physical insights, even if it turns out
the University of Science and Technology of China, that the universe isn’t cyclic.
who is interested in the idea that primordial black I am now retired, but I am even more optimistic
holes might have generated the supermassive about finding primordial black holes than I was
black holes at the centres of galaxies. 50 years ago, whether or not they formed in a previous
universe. I find it strangely appropriate that my career,
←- which began with the study of black hole formation
There’s more on supermassive black holes- at the start of this universe, is finishing with the
in Chapter 1- study of their formation at the end of the last one. ❚

Chapter 5 | Masters of the universe | 79

CHAPTER 6

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For all the knowledge they have gained,
cosmologists are aware of just how much there
is still to learn about our universe.

That’s why they aren’t afraid to ask the most

deranged, difficult and dangerous questions in
their attempts to get to the bottom of life, the
universe and everything.

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 81

ESSAY

RETHINKING REALITY
We are starting off with a relatively sane enquiry from theoretical physicist
Heinrich Päs: should our understanding of relativity and quantum mechanics
lead us to the conclusion that our universe is one huge quantum object?

OR almost a century, physicists

attempting to understand the most
fundamental layers of reality have
been inadvertently describing systems
without knowing what is going on inside
them. In the 1930s, when Enrico Fermi
worked out how a neutron decays into
a proton and spits out an electron –
PROFILE known as beta decay – he did so only
HEINRICH by considering the electrons, protons
and neutrons involved. Only decades later, when
PÄS physicists discovered an intermediary particle called
the W boson, did they realise there was a deeper layer
Heinrich Päs is a of interactions playing out at tinier scales.
theoretical physicist at From today’s perspective, Fermi’s description is
the Technical University the prime example of an effective field theory (EFT),
of Dortmund in Germany. a mathematical framework that allows us to divide
He is also the author reality into different size scales and analyse them
separately. In this way, physics behaves like a set of
of The One, a book that
Matryoshka dolls, where you can understand the outer
argues that there might doll without knowing anything about the dolls inside.
only be a single thing in An EFT is the name given to any work that exploits
the universe and that this idea. Whenever physicists want to describe effects
space, time and matter beyond an established but incomplete theory, without
are nothing but illusions. specifying what the new physics is, they use EFTs.
“Everything is an EFT,” says Cliff Burgess, a physicist
at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada, >

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RADACHYNSKYI/ISTOCK PHOTO

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 83

who has written a book about the approach. there is and the point at which gravitational effects
Crucial to EFTs is the concept that the different size become important and the standard model must
scales of the universe correspond to different energies. be replaced by something that unites gravity and
At the largest distances are the lowest energies, while quantum mechanics. According to this idea, the
the tiniest parts of reality are associated with the mass of the Higgs boson is expected be determined
highest energies. Fermi didn’t have a particle by the Planck scale. But the prediction is 17 orders of
accelerator like the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), magnitude larger than the actual mass we measured
so he couldn’t reach the high energies needed to when the particle was eventually discovered at the LHC.
reveal the smaller-scale reality of the W boson. The only way around this conundrum is to accept
Fermi’s description works well for nuclear that totally unrelated contributions to the Higgs mass
physics, though, and was an approximation of an from fleeting virtual particles just so happen to almost
even better, more fundamental theory: the standard entirely cancel each other out. This makes the conditions
model of particle physics, our best picture of matter we see in our universe as unlikely as a pencil balancing
and its workings. Now we know that the standard on its tip. It is known as the fine-tuning problem.
model is also incomplete, since it doesn’t include A similar puzzle crops up in cosmology, too. This
gravity, a particle for the universe’s enigmatic dark one involves dark energy, the mysterious force that
matter or a mechanism to generate the perplexing propels the accelerated expansion of the universe. The
masses of subatomic particles called neutrinos. expansion is thought to be caused by the energy stored
When this became clear, physicists realised that in the vacuum of space. But here, our observed reality
the standard model itself was also an EFT. differs even more from prediction: the value of the
For all the convenience they provide, EFTs might vacuum energy we measure is some 30 orders
be obscuring a truer understanding of the universe. of magnitude too small.
This is because they introduce problems. One that
particle theorists have been worried about for years ←-
involves the Higgs boson, the particle responsible for For more on dark energy, turn back to Chapter 3-
giving mass to quarks and electrons. In theories like the
standard model, particles can temporarily change into There have been some attempts to solve these two
short-lived particles, known as virtual particles, only to puzzles. An approach known as supersymmetry,
quickly decay back into the original particle. In a quirk for example, predicts new particles that cancel the
of quantum mechanics, the rules that govern the world quantum fluctuations produced by standard model
of particles, these fluctuations contribute to a particle’s particles. An alternative solution involves additional
mass. The extent of this contribution depends on the dimensions of space-time. This idea – proposed by
highest energy the virtual particles may have. Nima Arkani-Hamed, now at the Institute for Advanced
Importantly, working out the contributions to a Study in Princeton, New Jersey, and his colleagues – says
particle’s mass depends on the boundaries of energy that gravity may leak out into these extra dimensions,
within which the standard model applies – or the size making it look weaker than it actually is. Models based
of the Russian doll. As far as we know, the upper energy on this idea predict a lower Planck scale, meaning
threshold is the Planck scale, the smallest scale a smaller Higgs mass. The extra dimensions are

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“The conditions we see in our
universe are as unlikely as
a pencil balancing on its tip”
invisible since they are curled up so tightly that colleagues calculated that there is a maximum length,
they have escaped experimental detection so far. or minimum energy, at which the standard model
Both supersymmetry and the extra dimensions stops being valid. Beyond it, gravity takes over. It might
idea predicted the discovery of new physics at the LHC, seem intuitive that if there is a lower limit, there must
in the form of either new supersymmetric particles or also be an upper one. But crucially, the researchers
excitations in quantum fields that would run around found that these seemingly unrelated cutoffs aren’t
the curled-up dimensions. So far, however, the LHC has independent of each other. In other words, the physics
found the Higgs boson and nothing else. The possible at these vastly different energy scales seems to be
solutions to the fine-tuning problem have become related – a phenomenon dubbed UV/IR mixing.
increasingly fine-tuned themselves, because the The calculations didn’t suggest any concrete
LHC keeps ruling out hiding places. values for the low-energy cutoff. So Cohen and
In short, particle physics is in crisis. This is why a his collaborators tried out the largest scale they
small group of theorists, including me, has recently could think of: the radius of the observable universe.
started to explore another, radical approach – one In a further fascinating twist, the corresponding UV
that proposes an alternative to reductionism as we cutoff to this IR cutoff turned out to be exactly the
know it. Instead of treating the different energy tiny energy value of the universe’s dark energy –
scales of the universe separately, it treats them not the Planck scale, after all. If the virtual particles
as if they all have some bearing on each other. contributing to dark energy abide by this limit,
To understand how this works, consider that could explain why these effects don’t drive
an analogy used by physicists that invokes the dark energy to ridiculously large values.
boundaries where the colours of a rainbow become For a long time, no one took much notice
invisible. At the highest energies, and therefore lowest of this result. Most people had their sights set
sizes, beyond the violet colour in a rainbow is what on supersymmetry and its ability to resolve
we call the ultraviolet (UV). At the lowest energies and the problem of the Higgs particle. But recently the
largest sizes, you have what we call the infrared (IR). crisis in physics has become more apparent, as many
In between the two, in the visible part of the rainbow, potential solutions to the fine-tuning problem have
is the realm in which the standard model works. fallen away. As a result, the insights of Cohen and his
It has been generally accepted for a while that colleagues have been receiving a huge amount of
the model stops working at the infinitesimal interest from theorists like myself. I started to wonder:
sizes and high energies of the Planck scale. This if UV/IR mixing might help to solve the dark energy
is what we call the UV region, where the effects of problem, could it also assist with the second major
quantum gravity would kick in. But in the late 1990s, problem in fundamental physics, namely the
Andrew Cohen at Boston University in Massachusetts, unbearable lightness of the Higgs?
along with David Kaplan and Ann Nelson, then at To answer this question, Tom Kephart at Vanderbilt
the University of Washington in Seattle, wondered University in Tennessee and I first attempted to
if there was also a limit at the very large distances, work out what the IR cutoff might be for the Higgs
or low energies, that we call the infrared. boson based on the limited lifetime of the particle.
While studying black holes, Cohen and his We determined a UV cutoff that is 11 orders of >

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 85

magnitude below the Planck scale. It is better than by gravity rather than entanglement. Excitingly,
what we had, and yet still a million times too large recent work by leading researchers in string theory
for the Higgs mass we see. Adding extra dimensions offers a solution: by suggesting gravity itself may
could resolve the problem entirely. be entanglement in disguise.
Over recent years, theorists like me have tried several It is a bold idea, but I suspect entanglement
other ways to solve the Higgs problem using variations causes UV/IR mixing. If so, there are huge implications
of UV/IR mixing – each coming from various angles. for understanding reality at its most fundamental.
Some, like ours, take their inspiration from Cohen and If entanglement can be applied to the entire cosmos,
his colleagues’ work on black holes. Others were born then instead of everything being made of smaller and
in string theory, which suggests everything is made of smaller pieces, it would turn the universe into “a single,
unbelievably tiny strings. None of the attempts so far is indivisible unit”, in the words of quantum pioneer
supported by experimental evidence, but they may get David Bohm. All objects in existence would be encoded
us a step in the right direction. A few of them even point in a universal wave function, a mathematical entity
to one fundamental property of underlying reality that that describes a single, entangled state.
could be causing this mixing to happen, with big Soon, we may know if this matches up with
implications for how we see the universe. reality. Cohen and his collaborators suggested
Quantum entanglement is usually described UV/IR mixing would affect the interaction of
as a startling correlation between quantum objects. electrons or subatomic particles called muons with
Prepare two particles in a particular way, and a electromagnetic fields, showing up as a mismatch
measurement of one immediately fixes the other, between the standard model’s predictions and
regardless of the distance between them. But these measurements. And the phenomenon may crop up
correlations can be thought of as proof of the fact in other processes, too. One example my colleagues
that entangled quantum systems can’t be understood and I are currently exploring relates to neutrino
as being made out of parts: they are one and the same. masses. Unlike any other particles, the almost
Just as this indivisibility links faraway particles, it also non-existent masses of the elusive neutrinos can be
can link quantum effects at different energies. In other entirely generated by virtual particles, according to
words, quantum entanglement could be responsible some models. This means they should be more sensitive
for the UV and the IR scales of the universe than other particles to any UV/IR mixing effects.
seemingly talking to each other. If we do find evidence to support this idea, it
As we proceed up the size scale and down in would dramatically alter the way we conceive of
energy, the effects of lower energies could be broken the cosmos. It would mean we could not only see
by a process called decoherence. This well-understood a world in a grain of sand, as the poet William Blake
quantum phenomenon hides entanglement from once said, but we could also quite literally see the entire
the eye of a local observer. It is the reason why we universe in its tiniest pieces and particles. While this
experience no quantum weirdness in our daily lives. might sound like just a different way of going about
Some work has found a relationship between physics, it is much more than that. I believe that we
entanglement and UV/IR mixing, but the bounds are on the way to a completely new understanding
in Cohen and his colleagues’ study were caused of how the universe is put together. ❚

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ARE SPACE AND
TIME ILLUSIONS?
Quantum mechanics may help us figure out how the fabric of the cosmos emerges.

e tend to think of space- Maryland and Charles Cao at Virginia Tech to build
time as the underlying an intriguing explanation of space-time’s origins.
structure of the universe. Entanglement between particles on the boundary
But whether it really is of space-time gives rise to a particular “distance”,
fundamental or emerges the idea goes, and the entanglement distances
from something deeper translate into “geodesics”, or the trajectories followed
is a question that keeps by particles as they move through the universe. These
physicists up at night. geodesics build a geometry for space-time, something
“It’s not just a philosophical like the curved geometry that Albert Einstein’s
question that you discuss general theory of relativity says lies behind gravity.
over a beer,” says Marika Taylor at the University “Entanglement becomes curvature, and that curvature
of Birmingham in the UK. “It is actually something can be thought of as geometry,” says Michalakis.
that comes into the calculations that people do.” Yet this doesn’t answer the fundamental question.
The best place to start is quantum mechanics, Saying space and time arise from the boundary
which describes the behaviour of subatomic surface of space-time is just kicking the question
particles. Famously counterintuitive, one of the down the road. “We haven’t, in a deep sense,
theory’s core tenets is that connections between explained why space should exist,” says Taylor.
particles can transcend our usual notions of space The answer might be something completely
and time. This happens via a phenomenon called different. That is certainly what Chiara Marletto
entanglement, in which particles can affect each other’s at the University of Oxford thinks. She works with
properties even when they are half a universe apart. her Oxford colleague David Deutsch and others on
Cosmologists now generally accept that “constructor theory”, which aims to express the laws of
entanglement is intimately linked to the emergence physics in terms of which transformations of a physical
of space. If we know the degree of entanglement system are possible, while boiling everything down to
between two quantum particles, we can derive the quantities of information. Because the universe seems
distance between them. Do that for a network of to run as a kind of information processor, constructor
many particles and you start to form a geometry theory seeks an information-based take on the origins
from which what we call space can emerge. Perhaps, of space. “We would say that time is not fundamental,
then, space emerges from quantum entanglement. and space-time is not fundamental either,” says
What’s more, advances in string theory, a candidate Marletto. Such ideas remain a work in progress, though.
for a theory of everything, say that the goings-on in A deeper understanding will come through the study
space can be fully described by data held on the outer of cosmological phenomena such as black holes and
surface, or boundary, of that space, a phenomenon the singularity at each one’s centre, says Taylor. “The
known as holographic duality. Put that together with whole notion of space-time breaks down there, and
quantum entanglement and you can build a universe understanding how it breaks down is intimately linked
that boasts spatial structure: distances and geometry. to the question of how it emerged in the first place,”
Spyridon Michalakis, a mathematical physicist based she says. “We know that things are going crazy there.
at the California Institute of Technology, has worked Once we understand that, we can flip it round and see
with Sean Carroll at Johns Hopkins University in how the three spatial dimensions actually emerge.” ❚

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 87

INTERVIEW

IS THE UNIVERSE A
SELF-LEARNING AI?
Our universe might have taught itself the laws of physics, says cosmologist Stephon Alexander.

Alongside theoretical physicist Lee Smolin, virtual reality

pioneer Jaron Lanier and others, you recently proposed that
the universe learned its own laws in the same way that
artificially intelligent neural networks teach themselves.
What is the appeal of a self-learning universe?
I’ve asked the why question throughout my career:
PROFILE why is our universe special? String theory, for example,
tells us something about how the laws of nature emerge.
STEPHON You start out with a string – there isn’t any gravity or
ALEXANDER particle physics – but then these forms and forces appear.
Yet string theory doesn’t answer the why question.
Stephon Alexander It lacks a mechanism to select which from the slot
is a cosmologist, machine of 10500 possible universes is our universe.
string theorist and jazz If the forces in our universe were slightly different,
then stars wouldn’t be able to burn hydrogen. You
musician. He heads a
couldn’t make carbon, and if you can’t make carbon,
research lab at Brown then where are we? Why are the laws as we see them
University in Providence, today? So we’re trying to come at this another way.
Rhode Island, seeking A self-learning universe provides a mechanism
to unite the smallest to select those laws.
and largest entities in the
cosmos and unearth what How could the universe be self-learning?
Learning is accumulating information and then
came before the big bang. making decisions based on this. It also needs some
kind of stability; it must build and be sustained
through time. So you start off with a set of very simple

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JENNIE EDWARDS

primordial rules, which are also a set of learning rules. We’re still playing with the idea, and it might end up
These are prior to the laws of nature. If the rules can taking us in another direction.
learn some of the laws we now know exist, like the It also wouldn’t necessarily mean a neural network
laws of gravity, that’s a good learning system. in the sense of a hardwired computer. A computer is
We have the universe of learning architectures and just the substrate for neural networks. There could
machine learning and artificial intelligence. And then, be something more biological going on. The universe
in the other universe, we have the laws of physics as itself produced brains, so why couldn’t the universe
we know them. It’s two sides of the same coin. itself be a superbrain?

Which fundamental laws might have a learning If you find enough of these correspondences, would we have
architecture built in? to consider neural networks to be as “real” as physical laws?
“Matrix models” are one example. You can picture I think we would have to. It would be real in the same
these as chequerboards with different colours in each way that we think electric or magnetic fields are real.
square that are constantly changing. Each matrix can Or think about when Paul Dirac predicted antimatter.
have billions of columns and rows. Let’s assume this You have a mathematical equation that seems to say
matrix theory is the mother of all theories, that it something absurd about reality – that antimatter exists –
contains all possible laws. How does it realise the and it then turned out to be a hidden part of reality.
specific laws necessary for our world?
The mathematics of matrix theory seems to have How does a self-learning universe differ from
some of the ingredients of a particular type of neural an evolving universe?
network. The idea then is to show that at least one of Evolution depends on the idea of fitness within an
these neural network architectures can learn one of environment. In evolution, species get killed off. In the
those laws. That correspondence would be an indicator. same way, an evolving universe depends on there being a
That’s what’s wild and beautiful about this idea, large population of universes and only the fittest ones –
because if that’s nature at its most fundamental, say with the right constants of nature – will survive.
then nature itself is like a neural network. Learning means that you have an opportunity
to make a mistake without getting wiped out.
Wouldn’t it be a leap to go from this correspondence between These matrix models have a lot of space in which
the laws of physics, matrix theory and neural networks to then to store information. So you store that mistake as
saying that the universe actually is a neural network? a memory and keep moving forward. It’s akin to jazz
It is a leap. It would be analogous to a neural network. improvisation. ❚

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 89

ESSAY

IS THE UNIVERSE
FINE-TUNED FOR LIFE?
This vexing question spurred a years-long investigation for Stephen Hawking
and his long-term collaborator Thomas Hertog. Here, Hertog explains how
the solution they came up with turns the universe inside out.

HE universe appears designed,” Stephen

Hawking told me through his speech
PROFILE synthesiser when I first met him in
THOMAS June 1998. He continued: “Why is the
HERTOG universe the way it is?” For the following
two decades, until his death, Hawking
Thomas Hertog is a and I worked shoulder to shoulder
professor of cosmology on this question.
When he spoke of the universe
at KU Leuven University
being designed, he was referring to the
in Belgium, and director observation that, of all the universes that could exist,
of the Leuven Gravity ours is spectacularly well configured to bring forth life.
Institute. For many The universe’s biofriendliness, it turns out, concerns
years, Hertog was a the laws of physics themselves. There are numerous
key collaborator of features in these laws that render the universe just right
for living things. Twiddle ever so slightly with any of
Stephen Hawking. His
these and habitability would often hang in the balance.
book about Hawking’s Take the Higgs boson, which weighs as much as
final theory is called 133 protons. This may sound heavy (for a particle),
On the Origin of Time. but it is 100 million billion times lighter than many
physicists would consider a natural mass. The Higgs
boson couples to other particles of matter and, in this

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DVISIONS/ADOBE STOCK

CERN’s particle detectors measured

a seemingly fine-tuned Higgs boson
mass, which was announced in 2012

way, imbues them with mass, but these couplings universe is the way it is because nature had no choice.
also add to the Higgs’s own mass, so you would expect Around the turn of the 21st century, an entirely
it to be a far weightier beast. The unbearable lightness different explanation emerged. This one had its roots
of the Higgs is crucial for life, however, for a light in a series of surprising discoveries that suggested
Higgs keeps electrons, protons, neutrons and so on that at least some properties of the physical laws
light as well. That, in turn, ensures that the building might not be carved in stone, but could instead be
blocks of life, such as DNA, proteins and cells, the accidental outcome of the particular manner in
don’t collapse under the force of gravity. which the early universe cooled after the big bang.
Or consider the expansion of the universe. From the species of particles to the strength of forces
In 1998, cosmologists discovered that the to the amount of vacuum energy, it became apparent
expansion of space has been accelerating for that the universe’s biofriendly laws were forged in
about 5 billion years. The cause of this acceleration a series of random transitions during its earliest
is often attributed to something known as vacuum moments of expansion. Reasoning along these lines,
energy, which is predicted by quantum theory. cosmologists started wondering whether, perhaps,
But the density of vacuum energy seems to be 10120 there was more than one universe. Maybe we live
times lower than physicists expect based on theory. in a multiverse, an enormous, inflating space with
If the vacuum energy density of the universe were a variegated patchwork of universes, each with its
just a tad larger, however, its repulsive effect would own big bang, leading to its own local physical laws.
be stronger and acceleration would have kicked in
much earlier. This would have meant that matter ←-
was so sparsely distributed that it couldn’t clump For more on the inflationary multiverse,-
together to form stars and galaxies, once again turn back to Chapter 2-
precluding the formation of life.
The laws of physics and cosmology have many This led to a sweeping change of perspective on the
more such life-engendering properties. It almost feels idea of our universe being fine-tuned for life. Even
as if the universe is a fix – a big one. Traditionally, most though most universes would be sterile, in some,
scientists regarded the mathematical relationships the laws of nature are bound to be just right for life.
that underpin the laws of physics as transcendental String theorist Leonard Susskind once likened the
Platonic truths. In which case, the answer to the riddle local character of physical laws in the multiverse to the
of cosmic design – to the extent that it is an answer – weather on the US east coast: “Tremendously variable,
is that it is a matter of mathematical necessity. The almost always awful, but lovely on rare occasions.” >

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 91

In his view, our delightful cosmic weather is a fluke,
and the impression of design is an illusion.
All this was very much on Stephen’s mind when I first
walked into his office in 1998. I could sense he wasn’t
keen on the idea of a multiverse. Before long, I was
collaborating with him to try to find a better answer,
first as his PhD student and later as his colleague.
Stephen’s reticence to embrace the multiverse
grew stronger in the early 2000s, when it became clear
that it didn’t actually explain anything. In multiverse
cosmology, there are “metalaws” governing all the
universes. But these metalaws don’t specify in which

COURTESY OF THOMAS HERTOG

of the habitable universes we are supposed to be. This is
a problem, for without a rule that relates the metalaws
of the multiverse to the local laws within our universe,
multiverse musings get caught in a spiral of paradoxes
that leaves us without verifiable predictions. Multiverse
cosmology is like a debit card without a PIN or an IKEA
flatpack closet without a manual: useless.
Can we do better? Yes, Stephen and I found out, Thomas Hertog (left)
but only by relinquishing the idea, inherent in collaborated with Stephen
multiverse cosmology, that our theories can take a Hawking for many years
God’s-eye view, as if somehow standing outside the
cosmos. It is an obvious and seemingly tautological
point: our cosmological theory must account for the
fact that we exist within the universe. “We are not
angels who view the universe from the outside,”
Stephen began to preach. So we set out to rethink
cosmology from an inside-out, observer’s perspective.
This, we soon discovered, required adopting a
quantum outlook from within the universe.
The key role of the observer has been recognised
since the discovery of quantum theory in the 1920s.
Before a particle’s position is observed, there is no

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“Turning cosmology inside
out and upside down was a
quintessentially Hawkingian act”
sense in even asking where it is. It doesn’t have a we read the fundamentals of the universe ex post facto,
definite position, only possible positions described somewhat like how biologists reconstruct the tree of
by a wave function that encodes the likelihood life. “We create the universe as much as the universe
that the particle, if it were observed, would be creates us,” he once told me. When New Scientist
here or there. Of course, quantum observations are covered our idea in 2006, it was described as a
by no means restricted to those made by humans. “reverse choose-your-own adventure”.
Such observations could be made by a dedicated In hindsight, we were walking on quicksand
detector, by the environment or even through back then in the sense that we didn’t quite have a
interaction with a lone photon. solid mathematical basis for our ideas. As we began
Stephen and I came to understand what went to look for firmer ground, inspiration came from
on in the early universe as a process akin to that of an unexpected corner. Around that time, another
natural selection on Earth, with an interaction between revolution in physics was picking up, one that was
variation and selection playing out in this primeval all to do with holography. This would prove to be
environment. Variation happens because random just what we needed.
quantum jumps cause frequent small excursions A normal hologram encodes all information about
from deterministic behaviour and occasional larger a three-dimensional object on a two-dimensional
ones. Selection enters the picture because some of surface. In a sense, the third dimension emerges
these excursions, especially the larger ones, can from the surface when we look at it. The first inklings
be amplified and frozen-in thanks to quantum that even the force of gravity may have holographic
observation. This then gives rise to new rules roots go back to work in the 1970s by Stephen and,
that help shape the subsequent evolution. separately, Jacob Bekenstein. They discovered that
The interaction between these two competing all there is to know about the interior of black holes
forces in the furnace of the big bang produces a can be encrypted on their event horizon surface.
branching process – somewhat analogous to how Then, in 1997, physicist Juan Maldacena went further
biological species would emerge billions of years and envisaged that the entire universe may be akin
later – in which dimensions, forces and particles to a hologram. He showed that a system of quantum-
first diversify and then acquire their effective entangled particles located on a surface can contain
form when the universe expands and cools. within it all the information of a higher-dimensional
And just like in Darwinian evolution, this cosmos with gravity and curved space-time. Soon,
introduces a subtle backward-in-time element holography became the talk of the town among
to our hypothesis. It is as if the collective quantum theoretical physicists, who saw in it a promising way
observations retroactively fix the outcome of the big to finally get Albert Einstein’s general relativity, his
bang. For this reason, Stephen liked to refer to our idea theory of gravity, to work with quantum theory.
as “top-down cosmology”, to drive home the point that At first, the kind of universes generated by >

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 93

holographic theory bore no resemblance whatsoever We are in a situation not unlike Charles Darwin in
to the expanding universe we live in. However, starting the 19th century, who had only scant fossil evidence
in around 2011, Stephen and I figured out how to apply for his grand new hypothesis.
the cosmos-as-hologram idea to describe the earliest
stages of an expanding universe like ours. In this ←-
cosmological setting, it turns out it is the dimension For more on the CMB, turn back to p29-
of time that holographically pops out. History itself
is holographically encrypted. But I am hopeful this won’t be the case forever.
What’s more, time emerges in the ex post facto We are witnessing a revolution in gravitational
manner that we had envisioned. The past is contingent wave astronomy, and these waves can reach us
on the present in holographic cosmology, not the other from well before the CMB era. Future observations
way around. In a holographic approach to cosmology, of primeval gravitational waves should enable us
venturing far back in time means taking a fuzzy look to probe the universe’s earliest phase.
at the cosmological hologram. It is like zooming out,
an operation whereby we discard more and more of ←-
the entangled information that the hologram encodes. For more on gravitational waves,-
Holography suggests that not only time, but also the see Wave Hello in Chapter 4-
physical laws that shape our universe, disappear back
into the big bang. This is very different to the old Platonist An entirely different path to test our ideas has to do
view that the laws of nature are somehow immutable. with holography. Already, quantum experimentalists
Stephen and I held that it isn’t the laws as such that are attempting to create strongly entangled quantum
are fundamental, but their capacity to change. systems, made up of trapped atoms or ions, that
The upshot of all this is a profound revision of what holographically encode some of the properties of
cosmology is ultimately about. For almost a century, we black holes or toy-model universes. By experimenting
have been studying the history of the universe against with these systems, we can hope to learn more about
a stable background of fixed laws of nature. But the what sort of entanglement patterns underpin gravity
quantum outlook that Stephen and I developed reads the and the fabric of space-time. We might also be able to
universe’s history from within and as one that includes, see whether the origin of time happens in the specific
in its earliest stages, the genealogy of the physical laws. way Stephen and I envisaged. That would amount to
It is a radical idea, for sure, but one that may, an experimental practice of early universe cosmology.
in time, become testable. Some ideas to do with the Turning cosmology inside out and upside down was
early universe can be tested by deciphering the cosmic a quintessentially Hawkingian act. For Stephen and I,
microwave background (CMB) radiation, the flood inspired by the paradoxes of the multiverse, it was a
of light released 380,000 years after the big bang. way to get a grip on the appearance of cosmic design.
But the primeval evolution we envisage unfolded If this new thinking turns out to be right, it may yet
before that, meaning it is hidden far behind the CMB. prove to be his greatest scientific legacy. ❚

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IS THE COSMOS
CONSCIOUS?
Research has found the universe is ince the opening act of the universe
13.8 billion years ago, a diverse set of
remarkably similar in structure to the characters have trod the boards – stars,
human brain. But does this mean the planets, moons, quasars. But if you tend
to get fidgety at the theatre, there is bad
cosmos has a consciousness of its own? news: this cosmic performance has at
least 100 billion years to go. Which
raises a question: are we living at a
special moment – the cliffhanger
before the interval – or is this just
an inconsequential moment in the mid-plot?
One hint that this is a special instant involves
a swathe of observed properties of the universe
known as fundamental constants. These include the
strength of gravity, for example, and the fine-structure
constant, known as alpha, which determines the way
matter and light interact and thus how stars burn.
If these numbers were just a shade different from
how they are, then life might be impossible.
Why is it all so perfect? One possible answer is that
these constants aren’t so constant. Perhaps they have
been gradually changing over the life of the universe
and we happen to live at an auspicious blip in time.
John Webb at the University of Cambridge has spent
decades investigating this idea, in his case in relation
to alpha. Based on precision measurements of the >

Chapter 6 | The craziest questions in the universe | 95

 AGSANDREW/ISTOCK

cosmos, Webb has claimed in the past that alpha University of Sydney, Australia. That means at
has indeed morphed – although he now thinks those least a few billion years after the big bang.
claims were wrong, thanks to systematic errors in Being intelligent enough to appreciate this also
the instruments used to gather data. “The existing requires special conditions, says Lewis – and they
measurements are close to meaningless,” he says. are fast disappearing. That is because significant
Webb is optimistic that with artificial intelligence intelligence seems to take billions of years to develop –
and new instruments, like the James Webb Space it did on Earth – and the star formation that can
Telescope, it won’t be long before he has reliable data. support it is slowing. Intelligence-supporting stars
However, it must be said that most physicists thumb won’t be around for that long, relatively speaking.
their nose at the idea that the constants of nature have “More than 95 per cent of the stars that will ever
changed – and at the general notion of our universe exist have already been born,” says Lewis. “Star
being special. Alexander Vilenkin at Tufts University formation is winding down: in the future, stars
in Massachusetts has suggested that we follow the like the sun will become rarer and rarer.”
“principle of mediocrity” and assume that there In 100 trillion years, all stars will have died
is nothing particularly special about us. and the chances of habitability as we know it will
Still, there is a simpler sense in which we live have dwindled to nothing. That is the end of the
at a special moment in cosmic history. Life as we show. Cue infinite darkness.
know it couldn’t have formed before there were Practically speaking, we don’t even have that long.
stars to fuel it and planets at a suitable distance from Before then, the mysterious repulsive force known
their star on which it could develop. Life also couldn’t as dark energy will probably drive the universe apart
arise as soon as stars appeared, because it requires to the point that no light will be able to reach Earth
elements heavier than the hydrogen and helium that from any other star. Even if life were still tenable, doing
made the first stars to support complex biochemistry. astronomy would be impossible. In that sense, at least,
“Several generations of stars are needed to build these we are part of a singular generation of humans who can
[heavy elements] up to a level where you get planets ask and answer questions of the cosmos. “We truly live
and the chemistry of life,” says Geraint Lewis at the in a special time in the life of the universe,” says Lewis. ❚

96 | New Scientist Essential Guide | Our Incredible Universe

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