Recent reports have suggested a new model found the universe has existed forever and the Big Bang never really happened, but this is not entirely true.
The recent findings actually suggest the Big Bang did not start out with singularity, which is an infinitely dense point in space-time, Earth Sky reported.
"Did the big bang really happen? Yes, despite recent claims to the contrary. A new paper in Physical Letters B has the popular press wondering if there was no big bang, but the actual paper claims no such thing," Brian Koberlein, a researcher at Rochester Institute of Technology, stated on his website.
The paper, which is partially based on Einstein's theory of relativity, was produced by Ahmed Farag Ali at Benha University in Egypt and coauthor Saurya Das at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, Canada. By eliminating singularity, the model predicts the universe had no beginning, and always existed in quantum potential before collapsing in what we call the "Big Bang," Koberlein said.
"Unfortunately many articles confuse 'no singularity' with 'no big bang,'" he continued.
The recent model also predicts a cosmological constant, which is an idea originally presented by Einstein back in 1917. This theory suggests the universe remains static, instead of expanding. Once Edwin Hubble discovered galaxies outside of the Local Group are slowly moving away from each other, Einstein discarded the idea as his "greatest blunder," Earth Sky reported. The idea of a cosmological constant has been revived in recent years, and could provide insight into elusive dark energy, which is believed to accelerate the expansion of the universe.
"While this is an interesting model, it should be noted that it's very basic. More of a proof of concept than anything else. It should also be noted that replacing the big bang singularity with an eternal history isn't a new idea. Many inflation models, for example, make similar predictions. But none of these ideas eliminate the big bang, which is an established scientific fact," Koberlein concluded.
