Higgs Data and Planck Findings Call Big Bang's Inflation into Question

Data about the Higgs boson combined with Planck findings could paint a vastly different picture of the Big Bang theory. Although fluctuations in the cosmic microwave background--the afterglow of the Big Bang--seemed to line up with prevailing theories, researchers have now found that the origin of the Universe may not be as simple as once thought.

The Big Bang theory is the prevailing cosmological model that describes the early development of the Universe. Believed to have occurred billions of years ago, it's thought that certain conditions caused the Universe to expand from an extremely dense and hot state, and that this expansion continues to this day.

Preliminary analysis of the data found by the European Space Agency's Planck mission team revealed that the precise temperature patterns detected in the cosmic microwave background (CMB) support the predictions of standard cosmology. The Planck satellite mission itself mapped light temperature differences on the oldest surface known--the background sky left billions of years ago when our universe first became transparent to light. The standard cosmology predictions say that soon after the Big Bang occurred, the early Universe underwent a short burst of exceptional expansion known as inflation. However, new research seems to point to the fact that it's too early to confirm the notion of inflation.

Inflationary models share the broad prediction that the range of temperature variations in the CMB should follow a bell curve. So far, this has been proven correct by the Planck data. Yet the data also introduces new and serious difficulties for the theory.

As the Planck team narrowed down the list of possible inflation fields, the models that best fit the data were far less likely to occur naturally than the models that Planck ruled out. In addition, the latest results about the Higgs field from CERN's Large Hadron Collider (LHC) reveal that the Higgs field is likely to have started out in a high-energy, "metastable" state rather than in a stable, low-energy configuration. This makes the current list of possible inflation fields even less likely to have occurred.

In fact, the current data seems to point to the fact that the Universe would have stopped inflation too soon, cutting off its growth. The early Universe would have been more likely to curl up into a black hole than grow into a fully-fledged cosmos, according to Nature.com.

That said, there is still controversy about how "likely" these models are. Other researchers believe that since the Planck results are in agreement with the inflationary paradigm, the theory still holds.