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Was the Big Bang Really Real?
Not if we take the cosmology of the Urantia Papers literally rather than being for their stated purpose of providing a temporary universe framework in which to think about our universe careers. New evidence has appeared since our previous discussion of this topic.
One of the missing links in Big Bang theory concerned how the carbon needed to function in the formation of stars and galaxies actually came into existence. Presently it is made in the supernova explosions of dying stars. But that leaves an unfilled gap about how the very first stars came into being. According to theory, the first elements to be formed were the two simplest, hydrogen and helium, hydrogen consisting of a single proton and its accompanying electron and helium of two protons two neutrons and two electrons with the initial state of the universe being a gas mixture of the two.
Stars like our sun are still almost the same mix of these two gases as at the beginning of time. Our sun is 72% hydrogen, 27% helium, and 1% heavier elements, whereas the initial mix was 76% hydrogen, 24% helium, and virtually nothing else.
Among the heavier elements, carbon plays a vital role in star formation. One of its functions is as a catalyst that mediates conversion of hydrogen to helium, the energy released being the dominant heat source for all universe activity. In contrast, its second important function is as a coolant.
For unknown reasons the gas mixture of the early universe was not evenly distributed but without cooling of some kind, gravitational influences were insufficient to draw the clouds together to form individual stars.
So how the first stars formed has remained a mystery until recently when it was shown that a mass of the hydrogen-helium gas that is several hundred times the mass of our sun will shrink enough under gravity to attain the enormous temperature and pressure required for helium nuclei to fuse and form carbon--and one carbon nucleus in every 10 million atomic nuclei is sufficient to maintain the catalytic carbon cycle whereby hydrogen is fused to form helium. This is the nuclear furnace that drives all stars for the major portion of their active life as a star.
Not only does carbon function in the catalytic conversion of hydrogen to helium in large stars, but it also has a vital role in the initial collapse of gas clouds that will form those stars. Carbon readily combines to form carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen cyanide (HCN) that have the capacity to radiate heat away from gas clouds so as to drop their temperatures to be in the order of 20 kelvin--a temperature at which relatively small gas clouds can collapse under gravity to form stars like our sun.
Studies on megasuns have shown that there is a critical value around 270 solar masses that differentiates between stars above that level that eventually literally blow themselves completely apart leaving no remnant and those down to a mass of 200 times our sun in which a core collapses catastrophically to form a 30 solar-mass black hole that spins so rapidly it forms an accretion disk with jets of matter streaking outwards at almost the speed of light. As these jets slam into the surrounding gas, the high energy collisions give rise to gamma radiation that, because of its great age, should now be in the X-ray range.
These megasuns are believed to have existed only at the beginning of time as once the heavy metals form and become part of new stars, any star of more than about 100 solar masses will be unstable and seal its own doom.
The radiant energy from the gamma radiation emanating from megasun hypernovae should be detectable--but not with the instrumentation currently available. Their detection may come from a mission named "Exist" due to be flown from the International Space Station five years from now, or from NASA's Next Generation Space Telescope, the planned successor of the Hubble.
If the predictions turn out to be correct, it will be one more piece of substantiating evidence that Big Bang was real and that the cosmology given to us in the Urantia Papers was simply to provide a temporary universe frame that supplies a backdrop against which we can better understand our universe careers. (1260)
(For a discussion on this point, see the last page of Innerface Vol. 7, No. 5 which is available at www.urantia-book.org/archive/newsletters/innerface.html.)
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