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Space

Weird circles in the sky may be signs of a universe before ours

By Chelsea Whyte

15 August 2018

The BICEP2 telescope

Has the BICEP2 telescope seen something unusual?

Steffen Richter, Harvard University

Swirling patterns in the sky may be signs of black holes that survived the destruction of a universe before the big bang.

“What we claim we’re seeing is the final remnant after a black hole has evaporated away in the previous aeon,” says Roger Penrose, a mathematical physicist at the University of Oxford.

He is co-creator of a theory called conformal cyclic cosmology (CCC). It states that, rather than having started in the big bang, the universe infinitely cycles through periods of ballooning up and compressing back to…

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