UNITED STATES, August 16, 2018 (Science Alert by Mike McRae): If our Universe happened to be locked in an eternal heartbeat of expansion and collapse, black holes would leave an impression. And it could look just like a number of swirls recently detected in the faint echo of light at the edge of space. It’s hardly the smoking gun for what’s called the conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC) model, especially given other things that could also explain these scars. But it’s definitely worthy of serious consideration. As it stands, most cosmologists agree we live in an expanding universe that started as a homogeneous point called a singularity, and we don’t know what happened before it, or what could lie in our future.
Mathematical physicist Roger Penrose has a reputation on par with the likes of Stephen Hawking and Leonard Susskind. His model of a pulsating universe with no beginning or end isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but it is a contender for explaining the fate of everything. Penrose’s idea suggests the future isn’t destined for a collapse – we’ll keep expanding until everything evaporates into light and the very concept of space and time is made moot by the insane distances that exist. At that point, our Universe is indistinguishable from a singularity, out of which another one might emerge.
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HPI Adds: In Hindu thought, the Universe goes through endless cycles of creation, preservation, and dissolution when all is absorbed back into the source only to be issued forth anew in the next cycle of creation.