"Professor Roger Penrose from Oxford University says concentric circles discovered in the background microwaves of the universe … adds evidence to the theory that the universe has expanded ('the Big Bang') and contracted ('the Big Crunch') many times. … The research appears to cast aside the widely-held 'inflationary' theory of the origins of the universe, that it began with the Big Bang, and will continue to expand until a point in the future, when it will end. …

"They say that this means that … the universe cycles through aeons dominated by big bangs and supermassive black hole collisions. Professor Penrose believes that his new theory of ‘conformal cyclic cosmology' means that black holes will eventually consume all the matter in the universe. According to his theory, when they have finished, all that will be left in the universe will be energy - which will then trigger the next Big Bang - and the new aeon."

How cheery! It's still The Big Bang + Big Crunch Theory, now it's just The Big Bang Theory in infinite re-runs.*

(I remember a late-night session at college in the early 1970s, possibly not even a chemically assisted session, where a housemate of mine [waving at Charlie] and I worked out that this could be a likely scenario. Didn't realize we were so ahead of our time.)

A Urantia Papers student might ask, might these rings also suggest a cosmic substantiation of "space respiration"? (In fact, it was a comment by "FizViz, Brighton UK," conjecturing just this possible association, which brought this to my attention.)

The cycles of space respiration extend in each phase for a little more than one billion Urantia years. During one phase the universes expand; during the next they contract. Pervaded space is now approaching the mid-point of the expanding phase…. For a billion years of Urantia time the space reservoirs contract while the master universe and the force activities of all horizontal space expand. It thus requires a little over two billion Urantia years to complete the entire expansion-contraction cycle.

Your own local creation (Nebadon) participates in this movement of universal outward expansion. The entire seven superuniverses participate in the two-billion-year cycles of space respiration along with the outer regions of the master universe. … When the universes expand and contract, the material masses in pervaded space alternately move against and with the pull of Paradise gravity.

The Mail article notes that the universe's age is estimated to be 13.7 billion years, "and they have discovered 12 examples of concentric circles, some of which have five rings - which means the same object has had five massive events in its history." I'm not sure that calculation was comprehensibly stated, but if five events were evenly divided into 13.7 billion years, that's about 2.75 billion years per cycle. Pretty close, considering with all the variables there's a galaxy-wide margin of error.

Below the article, comments include this from one "Robert Tobin, Australia":

"Good bye 'God,' hello sense and logic and above all SCIENCE. … It was SCIENCE that made me Atheist even before I realised how stupid and illogical Religion is and how it spreads the Poison of the GOD VIRUS. THERE IS NO GOD, SO STOP WORRYING."

When I see this kind of remark, I usually think: "You know that the God you don't believe in? I wouldn't believe in him either." There is no logic in his anti-religious raving, no reasoning which draws a line between this scientific report and whatever problem he has with the concept of Deity. His remark sparked some responses, but I thought I would just contrast it here with this:

"Of the vast body of knowledge concerning the superuniverses, I can hope to tell you little, but there is operative throughout these realms a technique of intelligent control for both physical and spiritual forces, and the universal gravity presences there function in majestic power and perfect harmony."
—A Universal Censor, P15 §0 ¶3

So, yeah, stop worrying. He got that right.