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Scientists trying to explain the universe’s accelerating expansion usually point to dark energy, which seems to be pushing everything apart.

But an Indiana University professor has a new theory, reports New Scientist: We’re inside a black hole that exists in another universe. Specifically, a black hole that rebounded, somewhat like a spring.

Some fairly mind-blowing physics is involved here, but the gist is that Nikodem Poplawski of IU-Bloomington used a modified version of Einstein’s general relativity equation set that takes particle spin into account.

Including this variable makes it possible to calculate torsion, part of the geometry of space-time. It also gets rid of the black hole singularity, a phenomenon that general relativity cannot explain.

In a study published earlier this year, Poplawski said when the density of matter reaches epic proportions, torsion counters gravity. This prevents matter from compressing indefinitely to a singularity of infinite density. Instead, matter rebounds like a spring, and starts expanding again.

In Poplawski’s latest study, his calculations show that space-time inside the black hole expands to about 1.4 times its smallest size in as little as 10-46 seconds — two orders of magnitude faster, for lack of a better word, than the Planck time. This brisk bounce-back could have been what led to the expanding universe that we see today.

But here’s the real kicker: as Poplawski says, we may not be living in our universe at all; we might be living inside a rebounded black hole that exists in a different universe.

We could tell by measuring the preferred direction of our universe. A spinning black hole would have imparted some spin to the space-time inside it, which would violate a law of symmetry that links space and time. This might explain why neutrinos oscillate between their antimatter and regular-matter states.

New Scientist