What If Black Holes Existed Before The Big Bang?

[Lancewen]

It occurred to me that black holes are indestructible. Not even a big bang could harm or change a black hole. But as our universe expanded it would simply envelop any black holes that were around and continue the expansion.

 

If that assumption was correct it could go a long way in explaining early galaxy formation. Supermassive black holes would be the perfect places to promote star formation in the expanding hydrogen and helium young universe.

 

I know the current BB theory assumes everything in the universe including spacetime started with the big bang. But it's not a very big stretch to add preexisting black holes into the Big Bang theory, if you can get by thinking nothing existed before the big bang.

[Guest MacPhee]

It occurred to me that black holes are indestructible. Not even a big bang could harm or change a black hole. But as our universe expanded it would simply envelop any black holes that were around and continue the expansion.

 

If that assumption was correct it could go a long way in explaining early galaxy formation. Supermassive black holes would be the perfect places to promote star formation in the expanding hydrogen and helium young universe.

 

I know the current BB theory assumes everything in the universe including spacetime started with the big bang. But it's not a very big stretch to add preexisting black holes into the Big Bang theory, if you can get by thinking nothing existed before the big bang.

 

I don't think there's really any such thing as a "Black Hole", or a "Big Bang". There's a Steady State Universe, eternally operating within the framework of 3-D Euclidean geometry, under Newton's Laws. Other bizarre ideas may be interesting, as examples of the fertility of human imagination. But they lead to paradoxes, confusion, and ultimately - insanity.

 

Let's stick to logical reasoning, and reject anything which sounds absurd - because it probably is.

[Lancewen]

I don't think there's really any such thing as a "Black Hole", or a "Big Bang". There's a Steady State Universe, eternally operating within the framework of 3-D Euclidean geometry, under Newton's Laws. Other bizarre ideas may be interesting, as examples of the fertility of human imagination. But they lead to paradoxes, confusion, and ultimately - insanity.

 

Let's stick to logical reasoning, and reject anything which sounds absurd - because it probably is.

 

Exactly what do you find absurd about black holes? They have moved from a mathematical concept to the world of reality by confirmed observations of how stars are interacting with a powerful gravity source that can only be a black hole by definition. However I'm not very convinced the term "singularity" which is a mathematical concept, is true for a real black hole. I think it is more likely just the next stage of compressed mass after the neutron star. Once an event horizon it created (the point at which light cannot escape), we no longer have any way to know what's going on, on the other side of the event horizon. It becomes only educated guesses as to what's really happening. But that doesn't change the reality of black holes. For the sake of argument, let's assume black hole are real. Can you then contemplate what the life cycle of a black hole might be?

 

Even if Hawking radiation is real (not proven yet). How long would it take for a supermassive BH of several million solar masses to evaporate? I'm guessing much longer than the universe will have visible stars. That being the case, please contemplate all the galaxies going dark as all available star fuel is used up. What do you have? Several hundred billion very large supermassive BH's with a great deal of mass in orbit around them, just waiting for the next universe expansion event.

Edited June 26, 2012 by arKane

[CraigD]

:thumbs_up The idea of Pre-Big Bang Black Holes is appealing, because, as arKane notes in post #1, it neatly explains how the galaxies formed as quickly as they appear to have.

 

Primordial black holes – ones formed shortly after the big bang – provide a similar explanation, but pose a problem: assuming Hawking radiation predictions are correct, no sub-stellar mass PBHs appear to have formed. But there’s no (or, at least, I’ve not heard of) attractive theoretical explanation for why, if any PBMs formed, ones of many sizes, including sub-stellar mass, wouldn’t have. If HR is correct and PBMs exist, many should for any short period in the era of the universe, be reaching the final, fast, very powerful period of that evaporation, which should be easily, detectable. But we don’t observe any.

 

It’s tempting to conclude that HR is incorrect, but if we do that, the problem it so neatly resolved is back: Very powerful collisions of small bodies, such as cosmic ray protons, should create huge numbers of tiny black holes that grow into progressively larger ones, giving many sub-stellar mass BHs, many nearby, doing spectacular, hard to miss things, such as converting stars and planets into high-power radiation. But we don’t observe this.

 

So, taking HR and observation as theoretically and empirically true, we’re forced to conclude there are no PBHs.

 

With PBBBHs, on the other hand, there’s an obvious explanation for the lack of sub-stellar mass ones – they’re only formed by the collapse of stars over a certain mass and the combining of stellar-mass BH, predicting a minimum mass that appears supported by observation. Our universe formed galaxies early, matching observations, because many PBBBHs were around for this nearly homogenous, nearly all hydrogen early post-BB universe to clump around. Our “parent BB universe”, or its parents, were not so fortunate, forming galaxies slowly or not at all. Our “descendent BB universe” will be less fortunate, having so many BHs it gobbles up the new universe’s hydrogen into intensely radiating accretion disks, resulting in a hellish universe of essentially nothing but starless active galactic nuclei. Only our BB iteration and its close parent and descendent ones are in a kind of “multi-BB Goldilocks zone” that permits stars, planets, and ultimately, astronomers and physicists, like those we observe, to form.

 

The appeal of PBBBHs is tempered, though, by a couple of serious problems, which I think were overlooked in post #1 and subsequent, via a few unjustified assumptions

 

First, there’s reconciling it with cosmic expansion, which, while there’s no neat, compelling theoretical explanation of its cause, seems necessary to explain the universe as we observe it. This expansion is not like a simple expanding of molecules of gas in a low pressure regime, driven by repulsive pressure and accurately describable in the Classical Approximation – it’s not a movement of bodies in a fixed-metric space, but an expansion of the metric of space. Crazy as expansion sounds at first hearing, nobody’s been able to as satisfactorily explain the observed, large-scale motion of the universe without it.

 

A problem I see if PBBBH exist and expansion is true, is explaining how the expansion of space affects them. Does the space in which they exist expand in the same way as the young BB universe? If so, the density of the PBBBHs might become so small they were no longer BHs, or the distance between them so great the young BB universe’s hydrogen rarely encountered one. In either case, the PBBBH explanation for the early formation of galaxies is ruined.

 

There’s another problem with expansion. Although its rate is theorized to have decreases greatly after an early “inflationary epoch”, it now appears to be increasing. If this continues, the effect is similar to the problem above – PBBBHs that either cease to be BHs or are separated so widely that the next BB universe rarely encounters them.

 

Second, there’s a problem of duration. According to HR, big BHs last a very long time. BBs, however, assuming that they are large scale fluctuations in the quantum vacuum, occur very rarely, which is to say, take a long time to, as Tryon put it “just happen from time to time.” While HR gives us easy formula for calculating the duration of the Black Hole Era (give or take a few factors of 10, about 10¹⁰⁰ years), we need to do a similar calculation for the duration of nothing cosmology’s “time to time”. If the result is much longer than the BHE, PBBBHs are out, because they’ll have all evaporated before the next BB happens.

 

Does anyone have an inkling how to do this calculation? From what I’ve read, no.

[Lancewen]

The idea of Pre-Big Bang Black Holes is appealing, because, as arKane notes in post #1, it neatly explains how the galaxies formed as quickly as they appear to have.

Primordial black holes – ones formed shortly after the big bang – provide a similar explanation, but pose a problem: assuming Hawking radiation predictions are correct, no sub-stellar mass PBHs appear to have formed. But there’s no (or, at least, I’ve not heard of) attractive theoretical explanation for why, if any PBMs formed, ones of many sizes, including sub-stellar mass, wouldn’t have. If HR is correct and PBMs exist, many should for any short period in the era of the universe, be reaching the final, fast, very powerful period of that evaporation, which should be easily, detectable. But we don’t observe any.

 

It’s tempting to conclude that HR is incorrect, but if we do that, the problem it so neatly resolved is back: Very powerful collisions of small bodies, such as cosmic ray protons, should create huge numbers of tiny black holes that grow into progressively larger ones, giving many sub-stellar mass BHs, many nearby, doing spectacular, hard to miss things, such as converting stars and planets into high-power radiation. But we don’t observe this.

 

There could be another explanation for this. Forming mini or micro BH's from subatomic particle collisions is only theoretical and not fact. It could be these proposed micro BH's can't exist for reasons unknown at this time. Until one is actually observed to form and decay this whole HR is nothing more than convenient math solution without conformation.

 

So, taking HR and observation as theoretically and empirically true, we’re forced to conclude there are no PBHs.

 

With PBBBHs, on the other hand, there’s an obvious explanation for the lack of sub-stellar mass ones – they’re only formed by the collapse of stars over a certain mass and the combining of stellar-mass BH, predicting a minimum mass that appears supported by observation. Our universe formed galaxies early, matching observations, because many PBBBHs were around for this nearly homogenous, nearly all hydrogen early post-BB universe to clump around. Our “parent BB universe”, or its parents, were not so fortunate, forming galaxies slowly or not at all. Our “descendent BB universe” will be less fortunate, having so many BHs it gobbles up the new universe’s hydrogen into intensely radiating accretion disks, resulting in a hellish universe of essentially nothing but starless active galactic nuclei. Only our BB iteration and its close parent and descendent ones are in a kind of “multi-BB Goldilocks zone” that permits stars, planets, and ultimately, astronomers and physicists, like those we observe, to form.

 

If our local universe is in fact part of a much larger construct. What possible configuration could it take to produce our universe with PBBBH's in the equation. It has been speculated in the standard BB theory that it expanded from a singularity. How massive would that singularity have to be to have produced all the hydrogen and helium star fuel in our visible universe? I'm going to go with big beyond belief. I would hesitate to call it the grandaddy of all black holes, but the resemblance is there non the less. A BH that size would most likely have hundreds of billions of supermassive BH's in orbit around it in an ultra giant elliptical galaxy configuration maybe spanning a few billion light years in diameter. Would that meet the requirements of the universe expanding from a much smaller area? Maybe and it would solve the problem of all those SMBH's capturing enough gas quickly and starting star formation rather uniformly across the much smaller entire new universe.

 

I've read that the early universe had lots of quasars. That sounds about right when a large infusion of gas starts infalling into a BH it will heat up and produce a very bright proto galaxy. As the radiation reaches a fairly high density it will create a pressure wave that will push the gas surrounding the BH away and this will start the compression that will form the first stars.

 

The appeal of PBBBHs is tempered, though, by a couple of serious problems, which I think were overlooked in post #1 and subsequent, via a few unjustified assumptions

First, there’s reconciling it with cosmic expansion, which, while there’s no neat, compelling theoretical explanation of its cause, seems necessary to explain the universe as we observe it. This expansion is not like a simple expanding of molecules of gas in a low pressure regime, driven by repulsive pressure and accurately describable in the Classical Approximation – it’s not a movement of bodies in a fixed-metric space, but an expansion of the metric of space. Crazy as expansion sounds at first hearing, nobody’s been able to as satisfactorily explain the observed, large-scale motion of the universe without it.

 

This problem might be solved if we allow for more than one type of expansion. First the initial expansion. What possible explanation could allow for that much mass constrained by massive amounts of gravity to ever start expanding? Don't know, but would hazard a guess that there might be a critical mass size that causes a faster than light destabilization of the universe massive BH. After the initial expansion phase, the new universe would settle into what we now observe in the current expansion.

 

A problem I see if PBBBH exist and expansion is true, is explaining how the expansion of space affects them. Does the space in which they exist expand in the same way as the young BB universe? If so, the density of the PBBBHs might become so small they were no longer BHs, or the distance between them so great the young BB universe’s hydrogen rarely encountered one. In either case, the PBBBH explanation for the early formation of galaxies is ruined.

 

There’s another problem with expansion. Although its rate is theorized to have decreases greatly after an early “inflationary epoch”, it now appears to be increasing. If this continues, the effect is similar to the problem above – PBBBHs that either cease to be BHs or are separated so widely that the next BB universe rarely encounters them.

 

This problem is solved if we can picture the bigger structure outside of our local universe as being composed of many utra-super pre-universe BH super galaxies. As our local universe expands, the expanding galaxies will start encountering these utra-super pre-universe BH super galaxies and will be absorbed into their new orbits. The one thing a visible universe has that makes it very special is stars. New BH's require stars and over the lifetime of our universe there will be hundreds of trillions of new BH's created. You might almost believe our visible universe was primarily a BH nursery, that will add to all the surrounding utra-super pre-universe BH super galaxies. If in fact this is what happens, then we have a very natural recycling of mass which keeps the larger structure very dynamic and alive.

 

Second, there’s a problem of duration. According to HR, big BHs last a very long time. BBs, however, assuming that they are large scale fluctuations in the quantum vacuum, occur very rarely, which is to say, take a long time to, as Tryon put it “just happen from time to time.” While HR gives us easy formula for calculating the duration of the Black Hole Era (give or take a few factors of 10, about 10100 years), we need to do a similar calculation for the duration of nothing cosmology’s “time to time”. If the result is much longer than the BHE, PBBBHs are out, because they’ll have all evaporated before the next BB happens.

 

Does anyone have an inkling how to do this calculation? From what I’ve read, no.

 

The picture I painted, negates this last paragraph of yours. In support of my model I'd like to add a link to speculation about the reason for the observed "Dark Flow"

 

http://news.discover...w-universe.html

 

The unexpected movement of a large number of galaxies contrary to the rest of our universe would seem to indicate a vary large gravity source outside of our ability to detect with our instruments or beyond our light horizon (the limit to what we can see).

[Guest MacPhee]

Exactly what do you find absurd about black holes? They have moved from a mathematical concept to the world of reality by confirmed observations of how stars are interacting with a powerful gravity source that can only be a black hole by definition. However I'm not very convinced the term "singularity" which is a mathematical concept, is true for a real black hole. I think it is more likely just the next stage of compressed mass after the neutron star.

 

Thanks arKane. After studying your post, I can see that I ought to have said "singularities" are absurd, not "black holes". If black holes are only compressed, ultra-dense physical objects, with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them - they don't sound absurd. They'd be, as you say, "the next stage of compressed mass after the neutron star". That's a reasonable concept.

 

What I find absurd and unreasonable, is the idea of a "singularity" - all the physical mass vanishing into some kind of zero-dimensional mathematical point! That's the kind of idea that might simplify our maths. But it can't be a physical reality, surely?

[Lancewen]

Thanks arKane. After studying your post, I can see that I ought to have said "singularities" are absurd, not "black holes". If black holes are only compressed, ultra-dense physical objects, with a gravitational pull so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape from them - they don't sound absurd. They'd be, as you say, "the next stage of compressed mass after the neutron star". That's a reasonable concept.

 

What I find absurd and unreasonable, is the idea of a "singularity" - all the physical mass vanishing into some kind of zero-dimensional mathematical point! That's the kind of idea that might simplify our maths. But it can't be a physical reality, surely?

 

Yes that's pretty much what I think in a nutshell. I also think that just because mass disappears behind an event horizon, doesn't mean there are no longer any more levels of compressed mass. For instance why would I want to think a BH of a few stellar masses has the same compression as a supermassive BH of many millions of solar masses?

 

Also, if I think about it a little more, I see this mass to compression ratio as a very good reason why micro BH's cannot possibly exist. They just don't have the mass to maintain any kind of compression that would qualify them with BH status.

 

Also, to be perfectly clear, I do not believe in singularities other than as mathematical concepts.

[Djames]

I thought the idea of a 'steady state ' Universe went out with Sir Frederick Hoyle, when the Big Bang Theory took its place.