Bangalore: Indian astrophysicist Abhas Mitra, at the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre (BARC) in Mumbai, who had once challenged the Black Hole theory of Britain’s famed Stephen Hawking is in the limelight again.
Mitra’s earlier research had claimed that the so-called “Black Holes” must be grey-holes and not exact black holes, and the so-called “Dark Energy” — a topic of Physics Nobel in 2011 — must be an artefact rather than a real entity. His views remain uncontested till now.
This time, in a peer-reviewed paper — and also in a comment appearing in the prestigious journal Nature — Mitra demolishes the latest and much publicized claim of “direct evidence of cosmic inflation” — one of the key pillars of Big Bang model (BBM). Right now his paper is the 5th most downloaded article in the journal New Astronomy.
Inflation, or exponential expansion, is what cosmologists say happened to the nascent universe almost immediately after it was created out of nothing in a powerful explosion some 13.8 billion years ago.
As the theory goes, “inflationary” phase that lasted for a tiny fraction of a second dramatically increased the volume of the universe by an unimaginable factor of ten raised to power of 78.
Cosmologists believe that the short but rapid expansion would have generated gravitational waves, and that their detection would be an evidence of inflation and hence Big Bang. But the primitive gravitational waves are themselves too weak to be detected by ground-based instrument.
Hence astronomers have been searching for a distinctive mark, or signature, left behind by the gravitational waves in the so-called Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) — the thermal relic of Big Bang.
IANS
