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The news brings together all the elements of a great science-fiction story: an experiment in Antarctica, inexplicable results and the possibility that a parallel universe exists. Its start dates back to 2014, to a project promoted by NASA called Antarctic Impulse Transient Antenna (Anita). Anita is a stratospheric balloon that rises to about 37 kilometers above the base of McMurd or, in the south of the continent, designed to detect cosmic rays that reach Earth through radio wave signals.
Our planet is constantly bombarded by subatomic particles from outer space, whose energy is very high due to its high speed. Studying these particles that form cosmic rays provides us with valuable information about remote regions of the universe. But, to be able to do it, it requires detecting them and establishing their origin; the problem is that the paths of these rays are deflected by the magnetic fields they find in the cosmos, making it almost impossible to identify their starting point.
Fortunately, any high-energy cosmic ray emission also produces another signal: neutrinos. These subatomic particles, which have no charge, are not affected by electromagnetic or nuclear forces, and their interaction with other bodies or with other particles is minimal (thousands of neutrinos regularly pass through our bodies without us noticing). So, to locate the origin of a neutrino - and that of any cosmic ray that has been emitted at the same time -, it is enough to extrapolate its trajectory from its point of impact.
On two of her flights during the austral summer (December 2006 and December 2014), Anita detected a source of high-energy particles that resembled a shower of cosmic rays but was following an opposite path : it came from ice. Those particles, which seemed to correspond to high-energy neutrinos, did not behave as expected: their trajectory was ascending from the ground, without having bounced off the surface. That seemed to suggest that they had entered Earth through the opposite pole and passed through the planet, something impossible in high-energy neutrinos.
Different laws for alternative universes
"What we saw was something akin to a cosmic ray that behaved as if it were reflected in the ice cap, but was not," explains Peter Gorham, experimental particle physicist at the University of Hawaii and responsible for the Anita experiment. . "It was as if the cosmic ray had come out of the ice itself, something very strange. So we published an article on that, suggesting that what we had found was in tension with the standard model of physics ."
Since then, scientists have tried to apply different hypotheses based on the standard model of physics to explain this curious signal, but none conclusive. An alternative raised in a recent New Scientist article (although not evoked by Anita's researchers) is the existence of a universe contrary to ours - as a reflection in a mirror - created in the Big Bang itself, which would exist in parallel and in the one that everything would happen inversely to what we know.
Since its publication, the approaches of the New Scientist article have been picked up - and increased - by the media around the world, giving rise to suggestive and exaggerated headlines. "The impact of the news has surprised me quite a bit, since nobody had contacted us to consult us," explains Gorham. "The New Scientist article is a serious and intelligent account of some of the measurements we publish, along with more recent speculations from other theoretical physicists, but not related to our experiment," says the researcher. "Obviously, some tabloid journalists only read the title and the summary, and then confused the rest of the story ."
The media repercussion has led the University of Hawaii (UH) to come out with the information and publish a note stressing that the researchers at the center have never mentioned the hypothesis of alternative universes. "Media from around the world have used research from the University of Hawaii to promote a theory about parallel universes," the note says. "The headlines get a lot of attention, the problem is that the UH and NASA research has nothing to do with the theory ."
Parallel universes and other hypotheses
Modern physics has several theories on how the universe was formed after the Big Bang. One of them - to which scientists like Stephen Hawking or Richard Feynman subscribed - is that the first explosion was followed by repeated bursts that created an endless number of smaller universes ( pocket universes ), now scattered throughout space. In these alternative universes different physical laws could apply to those we know; that is, that anomalies like the one observed by Anita, inexplicable with our understanding of the universe, would be the rule. And the detection of these anomalies would be the echoes that come from these parallel universes to ours.
But the truth is that Gorham and his group have proposed a series of possible explanations for Anita's results, without having to go to other dimensions. Like, for example, it is a secondary particle produced by an interaction of neutrinos. "It could indicate that we are seeing a new class of highly penetrating subatomic particles," says Gorham. "Even more penetrating than a neutrino, because this particle would be passing through almost the entire Earth. That could be an indication of some new type of physics, beyond the standard model."
The researchers are also considering other options. One is that current models of the electromagnetic effects when cosmic ray particle rain hits the ice surface present certain uncertainties, which could explain the anomaly. Other researchers have suggested that ice reflectors may have compromised the results.
"We have investigated the details of these ideas, although none seem to fully pass the so-called Occam's razor test, meaning that the simplest possible explanation is the one that fits the data," Gorham says. "However, although the mystery remains in some contradiction with our knowledge of physics, to provide an explanation it is not necessary to speak of parallel universes in which time runs backwards ."
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