THESE days, cosmologists suppose of the big bang not as a single second, however an extended interval by which the nascent cosmos, then a ludicrously sizzling and dense soup, underwent a collection of transformations earlier than the universe we see immediately finally emerged via a slower course of of cooling and enlargement.
But our understanding of this “hot big bang” stays sketchy at finest. That means cosmologists have some freedom to generate new concepts about what actually occurred in the very early universe.
One intriguing risk is that darkish matter, the mysterious stuff thought to carry galaxies collectively, was fashioned in a …