This Cosmologist May Have Found Evidence of a Parallel Universe

When science sounds like science fiction. 

Scientists have examined a great cosmic glow in the sky, and at least one cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology thinks he has found something amazing: evidence of a parallel universe. 

It’s all about bubbles, apparently—bubble universes, which are theoretically strung together and sometimes, researchers believe, brush against one another, leaving a kind of bruise in the form of a heat signature. Ranga-Ram Chary is the cosmologist who may have found evidence of one of those close brushes, reported Phys.org.

Chary was closely examining data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck telescope, which has made an exhaustive map of our universe’s Cosmic Microwave Background, or CMB. The CMB is leftover light from a few hundred thousand years after the big bang. Within that sea of heat signatures Chary found an unusually intense region.  As New Scientist reported in October, that hot spot could support the existence of another universe if you believe in theories about cosmology “that suggest the universe we see is just one bubble among many.” 

The imagination kicks into overdrive at the phrase “parallel universe” alone, and the idea there’s even a smidge of evidence that those really exist is pretty exciting, but New Scientist spoke to Toronto-based astrophysicist Matthew Johnson, who was just fine with throwing cold water on us ever meeting our evil doppelgangers from opposite Earth. Distances are too great, and light doesn’t travel fast enough. Two different universes “could never even know about each other’s existence,” Johnson told New Scientist.  The idea we’re inhabiting one universe among many is “fun,” Johnson said, “but it seems like there’s no way to test it.”

We can accept that reality! Now we just hope none of the bubbles pop any time soon. 

Photos by NASA / Public Domain / Wikimedia