Scientists have been studying the beginning of our universe, and they have some new ideas about how it started and what happened right after it began. This study looks at something called inflation, which is a time when the universe expanded really, really fast. But there's a mystery about whether this inflation means the universe had a big bang start or if it can keep going back in time forever.

One question is if the universe has a starting point that we can’t go past because it’s like hitting a wall. This "wall" is called a singularity, where everything gets very strange and confusing. The scientists also want to know if there are ways the universe can go beyond this wall into another phase or period.

In their research, they found that most inflation scenarios mean there is a singularity, which is like saying the universe had a definite beginning. However, they also discovered that if the universe expanded in a very special way, it might avoid this singularity and be extendible, meaning it could go back in time even further without hitting that wall.

They used math and special coordinates to show how this could happen. They even compared it to something called the "de Sitter universe," which is a simple model scientists use to understand the cosmos. Their work helps us understand how the universe might have been born and what the very first moments after its birth were like.

In simple terms, this study gives us new clues about how our universe started and whether it had a beginning or has always existed in some form.