One astrophysicist is reporting that he might have discovered evidence of an alternate or parallel universe while mapping the light left over following the Big Bang over 13 billion years ago.
Ranga-Ram Chary, a researcher at the European Space Agency’s Planck Space Telescope data center at the California Institute of Technology, explained recently in an Astrophysical Journal paper that he observed an unusual glow observed in the so-called cosmic microwave background which could be indicative of matter leaking from another universe into ours.
According to International Business Times, Chary said that there is a 30 percent chance that the glow is nothing special, but he also said that there it could theoretically provide the first evidence of a multiverse. Based on existing theories, a collision between our universe and another should be possible, and the glow is the result of the fact that the physics of matter from another universe would be different from that of matter in our universe, New Scientist added.
“Our universe may simply be a region within an eternally inflating super-region. Many other regions beyond our observable universe would exist with each such region governed by a different set of physical parameters than the ones we have measured for our universe,” he wrote. “Collision between these regions, if they occur, should leave signatures of anisotropy in the cosmic microwave background but have not yet been seen.”
Findings will be extremely difficult to verify
While studying the cosmic microwave background, Chary removed all of the stars, dust and gas, and after doing so, there should have been nothing remaining except for noise. This did not turn out to be the case, however. He found that certain patches of the sky appeared to be brighter than they should have been. In fact, they were 4,500 times brighter than they should have been.
The glow, his research suggests, is the result of what RT.com describes as “cosmic fist-bumps” caused by our universe ramming into another (or vice versa). The patches appear to come from the period of recombination that took place a few hundred thousand years after the Big Bang. In this period, electrons and protons first joined forces to create hydrogen, which only emits light in a limited number of colors.
Analyzing the light from recombination could provide a unique signature of the matter in our own universe, as well as a potential way to distinguish matter from other universes. Jens Chluba of the University of Cambridge explained this particular signal “is one of the fingerprints of our own universe” and that other universes “should leave a different mark.”
This light is typically obscured by the cosmic microwave background, which should have made it difficult for even the Planck telescope to detect. Since they were so much brighter, however, it suggests that some of the protons and electrons from recombination may have come into contact with matter from another universe, making them easier to spot.
“To explain the signals that… Chary found with the cosmological recombination radiation, one needs a large enhancement in the number of [other particles] relative to photons. In the realm of alternative universes, this is entirely possible,” said Chluba. However, as USA Today noted, the findings may be difficult to verify, as Planck provides limited data for further study, and Chary admits that unorthodox claims like this “require a very high burden of proof.”
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