Astronomy is a very strange science. Studying the infinite isn’t easy. So being omniscient isn’t an option. Omniscience is for those who don’t know any better. For example – An exploding supermassive black hole in the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster has created a huge void and a lot of questions.
In fact, it was the void that gave away the secret of the huge explosion. Astronomers have been trying to figure out the reason for the existence of voids, and there it was, a literal smoking gun. This gigantic explosion was cited as releasing “20 billion megatons of TNT every millionth of a second for about 240 million years”.
It was enough to blow a very respectable-sized hole in a huge galaxy cluster. The explosion dwarfed any super nova. The void is big enough to fit 14 of our own galaxy.
That deserves to be called at least a “Big Enough Bang” in anyone’s language. There’s the issue of scale and “cosmic recycling” here. That is an enormous release of sequestered energy returning to the universe, the hard way.
Voids and the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB)
A much less clear story, however, goes with this revelation. The Ophiuchus explosion has just rather dramatically redefined the nature of the voids as three-dimensional ongoing realities. The CMB contains a LOT of voids. They’re everywhere. These spaces have a few offended electrons in them over gigantic areas of any number of light years.
The theory that the cosmos is “backlit” by the CMB is also open to question, or at least review. Stuck with the fact that we’re often looking at things that happened billions of years ago, there’s a natural tendency to see all this as history. That’s wrong, and obviously so. The Ophiuchus galaxy cluster, for instance, is 390 million light years away. However – If the universe is 14.5 billion years old, that’s not even last Tuesday in the same week. It’s about half an hour or so earlier the same day.
A lot is obviously happening, and it’s happening all the time. Black holes releasing enough energy to form vast numbers of voids are game-changers. Supermassive black holes contain a lot of energy, they’re universal, and they clearly do go “bang!” often enough.
A super dynamic shaping the universe?
There’s an even more obscure point to be made here. Galaxy clusters are phenomena of the cosmic web, the sponge-like neural network-like, fungus-like, structure of the universe as we can see it. Large explosions in such fundamental, huge, structures need to be understood.
What happens if you release so much energy in one of these structures? OK, you get a void; but what else happens? That energy has to do something. Vast amounts of energy don’t just sit around looking pleased with themselves. They re-enter the energy dynamics, but how?
What happens next? What’s it done to the Ophiuchus galaxy cluster? If you spray a galaxy cluster with that much energy, something MUST happen, notably interactions.
So what if we have multiple ongoing Big Enough Bangs, mappable by the CMB? What do we get as a 3D picture? It’s becoming increasingly obvious that the Big Bang Theory lacks a lot. It’s effectively “Something we can’t see, followed by radiation, followed by ionization, followed by galaxies, and here we all are”. Ah…really?
Science is never currently wrong, only previously wrong. That quaint little axiom applies to every theory ever made. The Big Bang theory simply can’t be the all-embracing thing it’s supposed to be, in that form. It doesn’t cover accelerating universal speeds, heating up of the universe, or anything else much. The heating alone must mean increasing energy levels, and that energy has to come from somewhere.
Nor does the cosmic web naturally fit in anywhere. How do you go from the Big Bang to something as coherent, complex and structurally different as the cosmic web?
Continuous bangs, perhaps in their billions, forming so many huge voids in such large numbers must rewrite that dynamic. The theory of a continuous universe isn’t exactly new. The mechanics of it, however, are more than a bit unclear. This discovery might well be the first solid clue.
