The Big Bang was the reason that created the universe we know, according to the most recent scientific evidence. Such an abrupt expansion of matter that its can echo to this day, with background radiation and the expansion of the universe today.
Recreating these primordial conditions in the laboratory seems like a difficult task, even if planned, but a team of scientists appear to have done it, and in a totally accidental way.
Using a 2 X 2 inch tube in a lab at the University of Central Florida (UCF), physicists recreated the detonation that probably caused the Big Bang and gave birth to the universe as we know it. It was a recreation that, however, had not been planned. The so-called 'Little Bang' was not in the initial plans of the scientists involved.
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UCF Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering assistant professor Kareem Ahmed and his team were initially testing engine propulsion to allow air and space vehicles to travel at hypersonic speeds.
"As we started digging deeper, we found that you could actually get this mechanism between a passive flame and a flame that becomes very active," Ahmed told the Inverse website. "It reaches a point that introduces a detonation that is essentially a supernova."
"We explored these supersonic propulsion reactions and as a result found a mechanism that looked very interesting," Ahmed said in a press release . "When we started to dig deeper, we realized that this is related to something as deep as the origin of the universe."
As described by the Inverse website, the structure was in the form of a 2 X 2 inch damping tube that induces turbulence and lets the passive flame interact with the turbulence until it self-directs itself into a detonation. It becomes like a very powerful rifle, according to Ahmed.
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The most fascinating thing about all this is that although the lab explosion is on a much smaller scale than the one that gave rise to the universe, the same theory can be applied on a large scale, which makes the experiment valid for tracing the mechanisms behind the Big Bang.
"Now you can use that trajectory to track the initial explosion," Ahmed said.
The results of the experiments were published in the journal Science.
SOURCES / Inverse / Futurism