Physicists Rodolfo Gambini of University of the Republic in Montevideo, Uruguay, and Jorge Pullin of Louisiana State University have applied the theory of Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) to a simplified black hole.
In so doing, they suggested that instead of a singularity existing at its center, there is a portal to another universe.
For many years theoretical physicists have believed that the universe came about as a result of a single Big Bang event - Einstein's theories suggested it was so.
However, the theory of general relativity can't describe what came before the singularity, which should exist at the point in time just before the Big Bang.
There is also the problem of the information loss paradox - if something falls into a black hole and is eventually squeezed to a singularity, what happens to the information it contained? Big Bang physicists are unable to explain it.
To address these problems, Abhay Ashtekar and his team at Pennsylvania State University, back in 2006, came up with a theory known as loop quantum gravity.
They suggested that instead of a singularity existing just before the Big Bang, there was the remains of a crunched down universe that had existed prior to the one that exists now.
Since that time, some in the field have begun to refer to the theory as the Big Bounce, to replace the name Big Bang.
In this new effort Gambini and Pullin applied LQG to a simplified model of a black hole.
Their experiment showed that everything that was pulled into the black hole didn't compress to a singularity after all-instead it was compressed to a certain small size, then was spit out in another part of the universe or into another universe entirely.
If this new theory is correct, they noted, it would do away with the information loss paradox and open the door to the possibility of black holes being portals to other universes.
The study was published in the journal Physical Review Letters.
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