Cosmic String

This is nuts! But it sure is interesting. I saw this on a Science Channel episode of How the Universe Works in which they listed the worst places in the universe.

One of these places is a humongous void. This super void is a location in space where there is very little galaxies, in some cases there are no galaxies at all, and these voids can be as much as a 100 million parsecs in size. The density of matter in these voids is less than one-tenth that of normal space.

Many cosmologists believe that these voids were created at the time of the Big Bang and they appear in the microwave background scans as places of lower temperature. One such super giant void is The Giant Void in NGH or AR-Lp36. It has a diameter of around 1.3 billion light years.

So, what do these super voids have to do with being the worst place in the universe? That's where cosmic strings come in. It's one of the theories as to how these voids were formed.

If you think that a Star Wars light saber is wild, a cosmic string is the ultimate weapon, assuming it could be tamed.

A Cosmic String is a theoretical object or phenomenon. It's defined as a 1-dimensional topological defect that was formed during the symmetry breaking phase transition that occurred right after the Big Bang's inflation period. I've written about this before. This is when the universe expanded at many times the speed of light for a brief (millionth of a second) period before settling down.

The formation of these cosmic strings could be equivalent to the formation of cracks in crystal of ice when it freezes. Freezing is a phase transition and the phase transition that occurred during the Big Bang could have caused these cosmic fractures that are called cosmic strings.

What's wild about a cosmic string is that it's very, very thin, about the thickness of an electron, or 1 fm, which is a femtometer or 10 to the – 15 power meters. Basically, they have zero width.

The problem is that no one really knows what these strings would be like. One theory says that they have negative mass and that they were responsible for clumping matter up after the Big Bang. Needless to say, it's very difficult to visualize these cosmic strings. String theory predicts that they have mass and angle deficit, which means that they are in tension with very high positive mass. Other theories equate them to brane cosmology's 3-brane types. Again, these are hard to visualize.

One thing is certain; one would be wise to avoid these cosmic strings because they would chop one down to a one dimensional debris field. Ouch!

Cosmic strings are theorized to be the way that the super voids were formed. They are also expected to provide two duplicate images of a distant galaxy by gravitational lensing. They could also cause duplicate image fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background scans. In addition, they should show up in Pulsar timing array data by the KIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

So far, none of these possible proofs have been verified.

Thanks for reading