CALIFORNIA – Our universe as we know it today could be just a “region within an eternally inflating super-region”, said a cosmologist from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). This means that there might be multiple universes around us, making ours a tiny little thing in a huge and ever expanding zone.
By mapping the oldest light in the universe that was left from the Big Bang recombination, researcher Ranga-Ram Chary discovered what he calls a “mysterious glow”, as reported in a study recently published in the Astrophysical Journal. This light, known in the astrophysical field as the Cosmic Microwave Background, is a thermal radiation on which Chary observed proofs of a universe crashing against another.
The cosmologist used data from the European Space Agency’s (ESA) space telescope Planck to create a map and then found a glow that was 4,500 times brighter than it should have been. Chary, currently the U. S. Planck Data Center’s project manager in California, claims this to be a potentially significant proof of the multiverse theory, which has been extensively studied for years. Every one of those unknown zones might have rules and parameters very different than ours.
Speculation about parallel universes has been since long ago among cosmologists, but they have not found strong evidences to prove their existence. Chary’s study could be a relevant advance for the cosmic inflation theory. Nevertheless, he himself wrote that such a claim would “require a very high burden of proof”. There is a 30% chance that what he found was nothing except noise.
Alexander Vilenkin, director of Tufts University’s Institute of Cosmology, said he did not see correlation between the signal discovered by Chary and a collision with another universe. He commented that collisions might have simply been nonsignificant nudges, and added that “a collision that would greatly enhance the density of protons seems to require a much more violent encounter.”
Furthermore, Jay Pasachoff, chair of the astronomy department at Williams College, affirmed that Chary’s observations in the cosmic radiation had many other possible explanations and that it still is too early to explain the phenomenon with a multiverse theory. However, he did think the glow could constitute something unusual and unpredictable.
Other skeptical scientists argue that such multiverse theories cannot be proven or disproven by empirical science.
Source: Tech Times