Skip to main content

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

3 comments

Scientists Reverse Time in the Early Universe and Discover New Clues About Cosmic Inflation

The Universe is nearly 14 billion years old, but many mysteries remain about what happened in its very first moments. One of the biggest questions in modern science is how the Universe became so large, smooth, and structured in such a short time after the Big Bang.

For decades, scientists have relied on a theory called cosmic inflation to explain this mystery. Inflation suggests that the Universe experienced an incredibly rapid expansion during a tiny fraction of a second after its birth. This sudden growth helped shape the Universe we see today.

Now, a team of researchers led by Giacomo Animali has taken a completely different approach to studying inflation. Instead of looking at how inflation moved forward in time, they studied what happens when the process is examined backward in time. Their work has revealed surprising new details about the quantum behavior of the early Universe and may help scientists better understand the possible formation of primordial black holes.

What Is Cosmic Inflation?

The Big Bang theory explains how the Universe began, but it does not fully explain why the Universe looks so uniform in all directions.

To solve this problem, scientists proposed cosmic inflation in the 1980s. According to this idea, the Universe expanded at an astonishing rate shortly after it was born. In less than a trillionth of a second, space itself stretched enormously.

This rapid expansion helped smooth out the Universe and explains why distant regions of space look so similar even though they are separated by billions of light-years.

Scientists believe inflation was driven by a special field that filled the Universe. As this field changed over time, it caused space to expand rapidly.

Tiny Quantum Fluctuations Changed Everything

Although inflation made the Universe smoother, it wasn't perfectly smooth.

At very small scales, quantum mechanics creates tiny random fluctuations. During inflation, these microscopic fluctuations were stretched to enormous cosmic sizes.

Over billions of years, these small differences grew into galaxies, stars, planets, and galaxy clusters.

In a sense, everything we see in the Universe today can be traced back to tiny quantum fluctuations that existed during inflation.

When Randomness Becomes Dominant

Normally, the inflation field follows a predictable path. However, under certain conditions, quantum fluctuations can become so strong that they dominate the field's behavior.

Scientists call this process quantum diffusion.

Imagine a person walking downhill. Normally, gravity guides them toward the bottom. But now imagine strong gusts of wind constantly pushing them in random directions. Eventually, the wind becomes more important than the slope itself.

Something similar can happen during inflation. Instead of moving smoothly, the field receives countless random quantum "kicks."

As a result, its behavior becomes highly unpredictable.

To study this randomness, researchers use a framework called stochastic inflation, which treats the field's motion as a random process.

The Traditional Way of Studying Inflation

Most studies of stochastic inflation follow the Universe forward in time.

Scientists begin with an initial state and calculate how the inflation field evolves as time passes.

This approach has produced many important results, but it also creates some mathematical problems.

In certain situations, quantum fluctuations become so large that calculations can predict infinite values or endless inflation in some regions of space. These results are difficult to interpret physically.

Because of these challenges, some researchers have explored alternative ways to describe inflation.

Turning the Clock Backward

A few years ago, scientists introduced an idea called time-reversed stochastic inflation.

Instead of starting at the beginning of inflation and moving forward, they start at the end of inflation and work backward.

This may sound strange, but it offers an important advantage.

All observations made by astronomers occur after inflation has ended. Therefore, starting from the end of inflation may provide a more natural way of describing the Universe from the viewpoint of real observers.

Previous studies showed that this backward approach avoids several mathematical problems that appear in traditional calculations.

The new study takes this idea one step further.

Studying a Cosmic "Quantum Well"

The researchers focused on a special scenario called a quantum well.

In this model, the inflation field moves through a flat region of its energy landscape.

Because the region is perfectly flat, there is almost no force pushing the field in any particular direction.

As a result, quantum fluctuations become the dominant factor controlling the field's movement.

You can think of it like placing a ball on a perfectly flat table. Since there is no slope, even the smallest vibration can influence where the ball moves.

This setup is particularly important because similar conditions may have existed in the early Universe and could have generated unusually large density fluctuations.

Those fluctuations may have later collapsed into primordial black holes.

What Are Primordial Black Holes?

Most black holes form when massive stars collapse.

However, scientists have long wondered whether some black holes might have formed much earlier—directly from extreme density fluctuations in the young Universe.

These hypothetical objects are known as primordial black holes.

Unlike ordinary black holes, primordial black holes would not require stars to form. They could have appeared just moments after the Big Bang.

Some researchers believe they may help explain dark matter or other cosmic mysteries.

Because their formation depends on extremely rare fluctuations, understanding the statistics of those fluctuations is very important.

What Did the Researchers Discover?

Animali and his team found that the behavior of the inflation field depends strongly on the size of the quantum well.

When the flat region is relatively wide, the field behaves almost the same way as it does in an infinitely large flat region. The boundaries have little effect.

But when the flat region becomes narrow, something remarkable happens.

Quantum randomness becomes much stronger.

The fluctuations become so powerful that the system gradually loses information about where the field originally started.

In other words, the field "forgets" its initial conditions.

This means the future behavior becomes almost entirely controlled by quantum randomness rather than its starting point.

A New Picture of Cosmic Fluctuations

The researchers also calculated how density fluctuations are distributed in this backward-time framework.

For small fluctuations, the results closely match previous studies.

However, large fluctuations behave differently.

The team found that the probability of extreme fluctuations decreases exponentially on both positive and negative sides of the distribution.

Even more interestingly, these probabilities fall off twice as quickly as predicted by traditional forward-time calculations.

This difference may seem small, but it could significantly affect predictions about rare events such as primordial black hole formation.

Since primordial black holes depend on the most extreme fluctuations, even subtle changes in the statistical distribution can dramatically alter how many black holes scientists expect to find.

Why This Discovery Matters

This study shows that looking at inflation from a different perspective can reveal important new insights about the early Universe.

The research confirms that time-reversed stochastic inflation provides a powerful and mathematically consistent way to study quantum diffusion.

It also highlights how strongly quantum randomness may have influenced the first moments of cosmic history.

Most importantly, the findings improve our understanding of the rare fluctuations that may have created primordial black holes and other unusual structures in the young Universe.

As scientists continue exploring the quantum origins of the cosmos, this new backward-time approach could become an important tool for uncovering what really happened during the Universe's earliest moments. The study reminds us that sometimes, to understand the beginning of everything, scientists need to look at time in reverse.

Reference: Chiara Animali, Baptiste Blachier, Nanoka Okada, Christophe Ringeval, Tomo Takahashi, Koki Tokeshi, "Time-reversed stochastic inflation in the quantum well", Arxiv, 2026. https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31323

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular

Scientists Discover Way to Send Information into Black Holes Without Using Energy

For years, scientists believed that adding even one qubit (a unit of quantum information) to a black hole needed energy. This was based on the idea that a black hole’s entropy must increase with more information, which means it must gain energy. But a new study by Jonah Kudler-Flam and Geoff Penington changes that thinking. They found that quantum information can be teleported into a black hole without adding energy or increasing entropy . This works through a process called black hole decoherence , where “soft” radiation — very low-energy signals — carry information into the black hole. In their method, the qubit enters the black hole while a new pair of entangled particles (like Hawking radiation) is created. This keeps the total information balanced, so there's no violation of the laws of physics. The energy cost only shows up when information is erased from the outside — these are called zerobits . According to Landauer’s principle, erasing information always needs energy. But ...
3 comments
Read more

Black Holes That Never Dies

Black holes are powerful objects in space with gravity so strong that nothing can escape them. In the 1970s, Stephen Hawking showed that black holes can slowly lose energy by giving off tiny particles. This process is called Hawking radiation . Over time, the black hole gets smaller and hotter, and in the end, it disappears completely. But new research by Menezes and his team shows something different. Using a theory called Loop Quantum Gravity (LQG) , they studied black holes with quantum corrections. In their model, the black hole does not vanish completely. Instead, it stops shrinking when it reaches a very small size. This leftover is called a black hole remnant . They also studied something called grey-body factors , which affect how much energy escapes from a black hole. Their findings show that the black hole cools down and stops losing mass once it reaches a minimum mass . This new model removes the idea of a “singularity” at the center of the black hole and gives us a better ...
Post a Comment
Read more

How Planetary Movements Might Explain Sunspot Cycles and Solar Phenomena

Sunspots, dark patches on the Sun's surface, follow a cycle of increasing and decreasing activity every 11 years. For years, scientists have relied on the dynamo model to explain this cycle. According to this model, the Sun's magnetic field is generated by the movement of plasma and the Sun's rotation. However, this model does not fully explain why the sunspot cycle is sometimes unpredictable. Lauri Jetsu, a researcher, has proposed a new approach. Jetsu’s analysis, using a method called the Discrete Chi-square Method (DCM), suggests that planetary movements, especially those of Earth, Jupiter, and Mercury, play a key role in driving the sunspot cycle. His theory focuses on Flux Transfer Events (FTEs), where the magnetic fields of these planets interact with the Sun’s magnetic field. These interactions could create the sunspots and explain other solar phenomena like the Sun’s magnetic polarity reversing every 11 years. The Sun, our closest star, has been a subject of scient...
Post a Comment
Read more