A NASA experiment carried out in Antarctica might have just changed the way we view reality.
According to reports, mysterious readings potentially give life to one of science fiction’s
most exciting concepts… parallel worlds!
But could it all be just another false alarm?
How excited should we really be about what’s happening with the ice?
This is Unveiled, and today we’re answering the extraordinary question; did NASA just
find proof of parallel universes?
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News reports began circulating in spring 2020 that a “parallel universe where time runs
backwards” had been discovered in Antarctica - with the stories all referring to NASA’s
ANITA experiment.
ANITA, or the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna, is a balloon-based particle detector
located in Antarctica.
Its main goal is to study neutrinos, or ghost particles, created by the radioactive decay
that happens when ultra-high-energy cosmic rays reach Earth from space.
Cosmic rays are subatomic particles flying through space at almost the speed of light.
They mainly originate from ultra-powerful space phenomena like supernovae and quasars,
and they actually strike Earth all of the time, producing billions of secondary particles
when they do so… but we still don’t know a great deal about them.
First and foremost, though, it’s the subatomic, “ghost particle” neutrino produce of all
this science that ANITA is especially interested in.
Generally speaking, neutrinos are very difficult to detect because they barely interact with
matter and effectively pass through everything, ghost-like.
They can, however, be more easily detected through ice, which is why ANITA is set up
in Antarctica in the first place.
But, ANITA’s latest readings appear to defy current explanation… as they seem to suggest
that, rather than coming from cosmic rays raining down on Earth and reflecting through
the ice, neutrinos are being generated within the ice itself and shooting upwards.
For anyone who isn’t a cosmic ray specialist, this might not seem all that important…
but it’s unusual because it could imply that the ultra-high-energy neutrinos have
somehow passed through Earth and without bumping into anything and losing energy - which should
be impossible!
To further explore the phenomenon, then, the team at ANITA called on the team at the nearby
IceCube Neutrino Observatory - another base near the south pole designed for similar study,
with thousands more neutrino sensors buried at various levels, thousands of feet into
the ice.
In theory, because of its increased scope, IceCube should’ve been able to detect more
events than ANITA could, and therefore solve the puzzle…
Except, that didn’t exactly happen.
IceCube did find more mysteriously “upward moving” cosmic rays, but still no definite
“source” from whence they came, meaning the further study hasn’t really brought
us any closer to uncovering the truth.
And so, the theories have begun, with one particular explanation for the unexplained
measurements quickly earning headlines around the world; that the errant neutrinos are in
some way evidence of a parallel universe.
And not just any parallel universe, either… but a CPT symmetric universe, which is said
to be a mirror image of our own universe, traveling in the opposite direction from the
Big Bang.
In this theorised CPT symmetric world, which it’s thought could feasibly exist without
breaking the laws of physics, time runs backward, all negative charges become positive, and
momentum is reversed.
Every particle in our reality has a mirror image sister particle in the other.
If true, it amounts to a world built of one of modern science’s greatest enigmas; antimatter.
The idea being that the wayward neutrinos that ANITA has detected could represent some
sort of leak from that reality to this.
According to some theories, they might even be a brand-new type of particle themselves,
ready for scientists to try and incorporate into our current understanding of how the
universe works.
At this stage, a CPT symmetric plane is just one idea as to the nature of what’s happening
in Antarctica - and, according to some onlookers, it is a very tenuous idea, too.
But, even if it was the case, and there really was a parallel universe overlapping with ours
at the south pole, then the discovery wouldn’t necessarily enable us to move from one universe
to another.
Not by a long shot.
These particles of interest are still subatomic and traveling at almost the speed of light;
so, if you need to be both subatomic and FTL-capable to bridge the gaps between universes, then
humans still have no hope of actually doing so.
In theoretical science terms, this hypothetical glimpse of what possibly exists amounts to
an impenetrable door probably locked forever.
And, besides, even if we could cross over, it’s difficult to imagine us ever being
able to survive there.
Under the rare and precise conditions that we’ve ever been able to artificially create
antimatter on Earth, it’s always proven incredibly difficult to stabilize and store
it.
So, the same would presumably be true of positive matter - like, human bodies, for example - in
the mirror world.
Before our forward-thinking brains could even begin to interpret an opposite world in reverse,
we’d more than likely just disintegrate.
The only thing we can say for sure about the Antarctic neutrinos at this stage is that
they indicate that something could be missing from the Standard Model of physics.
Particle physicists have suspected this for some time, hence the creation of alternative
models like CPT symmetry (or the broader ideas on supersymmetry).
But, as exciting as the prospect of a backward parallel universe is, there have been some
more grounded explanations put forward for ANITA’s findings as well.
One experiment held in response to ANITA, for example, specifically studied the reflectivity
of the Antarctic surface.
The idea is that perhaps it’s the makeup and properties of the ice that’s creating
so many strange results, rather than the emergence of actually unexplained particles.
Antarctica is arguably already Earth’s most mysterious continent, so cold that it’s
only populated by scientists on short-term research postings…
But, even so, should this reported potential gateway to a parallel universe turn out to
be little more than a complex “trick of the light”… it could well go down in history
as quite the anti-climax.
But, that’s the nature of scientific discovery.
The mirror world theory for the Antarctic neutrinos still ranks as a very unlikely explanation,
but until further study reveals the truth… it’s an explanation which isn’t likely
to disappear anytime soon.
What do you think?
Is there anything we missed?
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