For decades, scientists have viewed the Big Bang as the starting point of space and time. But research into cosmic inflation—the lightning-fast expansion that likely occurred before the Big Bang itself—has complicated that view. If inflation happened first, it may have left behind subtle fingerprints in the cosmic microwave background, the faint radiation still echoing from the universe’s birth.
According to new research, physicists now suggest that dark matter, the invisible substance that shapes galaxies, may have formed just before the Big Bang. And if that’s true, then the idea that our universe began with the Big Bang may be fundamentally wrong.
The study, published by researchers from the University of Texas at Austin in 2024, proposes that dark matter may have already begun to form during inflation. Their model is called warm inflation via ultraviolet freeze-in (or WIFI), and it breaks down how the extreme heat and energy of inflation could have generated radiation and triggered tiny interactions that created dark matter particles before the Big Bang even started.
This stands in contrast to most models, which assume anything formed during inflation would be obliterated by the expansion. But the WIFI model suggests otherwise. In this scenario, dark matter not only survives, it thrives and becomes one of the universe’s earliest building blocks.
Dark matter has long remained a mystery at the heart of modern physics. It doesn’t reflect or emit light, yet its gravitational pull shapes galaxies and cosmic structures. Scientists have never directly observed it, and its origins remain unknown. If it really existed before the Big Bang, it could shift how we understand everything from matter formation to the birth of time itself.
The research still needs further validation, but its implications are massive. If dark matter can form before the Big Bang, what else might lie beyond our universe’s beginning? What if this isn’t true at all, and previous theories that the universe began with two bangs are actually true?
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