A truly mind-blowing theory has come to light as astrophysicists claim to have discovered a ghost black hole that could be from a universe that existed before the Big Bang.
That's right, everything we could've known all this time could have been wrong - there could have been another universe before our current ever-expanding one.
Although those universes were destroyed, along with their black holes, they had enough energy to be detected in the newer universes - like ours.
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The dead black holes, from the dead universes, have been discovered in Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) data, where their phantoms will appear.
Black holes are a menacing concept. They are massive space vacuums with such immense and substantial gravitational force that nothing can escape it, not even light.
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They might be huge, powerful vacuums but black holes do actually release blackbody radiation - which is called Hawking radiation, named after famous British astrophysicist, the late Stephen Hawking.
The idea universes existed before our own has been theorised by Roger Penrose, a celebrated Oxford University physicist, mathematician Daniel An from State University of New York Maritime College and University of Warsaw theoretical physicist Krzysztof Meissner.
Penrose, who was one of Stephen Hawking's most beloved colleagues, believes that there were universes before the Big Bang.
These amazing scientific bods say that evidence of these black hole phantoms means the Big Bang theory needs to be updated with this new multiverse theory.
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Penrose and his team analysed CMB data of possible black holes that died many billions of years ago.
He said he is able to detect the phantom black holes because they've left an imprint on time and space with cosmic Hawking radiation.
"It's not the black hole's singularity, or its actual, physical body," Dr. Penrose told Live Science. "But the... entire Hawking radiation of the hole throughout its history."
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He added: "The thing about this period of time is that massless gravitons and photons don't really experience time or space."
Basically, even though an entire universe has been annihilated it has actually left a lasting mark on a universe it has never interacted with.
The Hawking radiation actually morbidly shows the eerie death of the black hole as a new universe is born.
But once the black hole has been destroyed it leaves traces of particles where it once gorged on asteroids, planets, and even stars.
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Dr. An says that the particles are different because they don't behave in the same manner as objects that have mass based on Einstein's theory of relatively.
They don't interact with anything and that's why they call them ghost, or phantom, black holes.
Dr Penrose said: "If the universe goes on and on and the black holes gobble up everything, at a certain point, we're only going to have black holes.
"Then what's going to happen is that these black holes will gradually, gradually shrink."
This theory opens a whole new can of worms when it comes to the possibilities of the multiverse and the thought we may not be living in the first universe - or even the second, or even the 300th. Well, that's one way to blow your mind on Monday morning.
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