NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) is the most advanced telescope ever constructed, designed for operation in deep space, approximately 1.5 million miles from Earth. The orbital observatory launched from the surface of the Earth on December 25, 2021, and began operations from a gravitationally stable locale at Earth’s L2 Lagrange point in the summer of 2022.
In the three years since it began snapping pictures, it has returned some of the most detailed images from the farthest reaches of the cosmos. Now, JWST may have revealed evidence that our entire universe exists inside the event horizon of a black hole inside a larger parent universe.
How baby universes could sprout from black holes
Black holes are physical Twilight Zones, some of the most mysterious objects in the universe, difficult to find, and even harder to study. They form when a massive star, at least 20 times as massive as the Sun, reaches the end of its life and collapses in on itself.
During most of a star’s life, the outward pressure of fusion and the inward pressure of gravity reach a long-standing balance. After millions of years (high mass stars burn through their fuel more quickly and don’t last as long) fusion fizzles and gravity wins out, compressing the star’s core into an object so dense that even light can’t escape its gravitational pull.
In the conventional picture of a black hole, the matter at its center gets condensed into a singularity, a one-dimensional point of spacetime with infinite density. Black hole cosmology suggests instead that bizarre forces at work inside a black hole prevent it from collapsing indefinitely and actually work to form a new universe nested inside a larger parent universe.
The math suggests that when a black hole reaches monstrous densities in its core, the quantum-mechanical angular momentum (commonly called spin) of elementary particles creates a force called torsion which combats gravity. From there, the black hole would experience a bounce back which, from the inside, might look a lot like the Big Bang.
Despite the bounce and subsequent expansion, nothing can leave the event horizon, so it expands into a new region of spacetime. If true, every black hole would become a wormhole, otherwise known as an Einstein-Rosen bridge, leading to a new universe on the other side of the event horizon.
Is our universe inside the event horizon of a black hole?
It’s a difficult question to answer. Assuming it’s true that our universe resides inside a black hole, there would be no way for us to see beyond our own event horizon. We could hypothetically send something inside of a black hole and into a new universe, but it would never be able to report back. If black holes create new regions of spacetime, they are forever separated from one another, but they might leave fingerprints you could see from the inside.
Since it began operations, JWST has been collecting data about distant galaxies as part of the JWST Advanced Deep Extragalactic Survey (JADES) program. So far, the majority of galaxies it has observed are all rotating in the same direction, which could be explained by a black hole origin for the universe.
Astronomers observed 263 galaxies clearly enough to determine the direction of their spin. For every galaxy spinning counter-clockwise (the direction of our own Milky Way galaxy), there are two spinning clockwise. If the spin were random, we would expect the directional split to be more or less even. Instead, the universe appears to have a preferential direction for galactic spin.
“It is still not clear what causes this to happen, but there are two primary possible explanations. One explanation is that the universe was born rotating. That explanation agrees with theories such as black hole cosmology, which postulates that the entire universe is the interior of a black hole. But if the universe was indeed born rotating it means that the existing theories about the cosmos are incomplete,” said study author Lior Shamir, in a statement.
It’s also possible that the observed spin imbalance is the result of observational artifacts. The Earth rotates around the center of our own galaxy and that rotation could make galaxies spinning in the opposite direction appear brighter and be overrepresented in the data.
“If that is indeed the case, we will need to re-calibrate our distance measurements for the deep universe,” Shamir said. "The re-calibration of distance measurements can also explain several other unsolved questions in cosmology such as the differences in the expansion rates of the universe and the large galaxies that according to the existing distance measurements are expected to be older than the universe itself.”
Cross the boundary beyond reality in The Twilight Zone, airing regularly on SYFY.