“Nasa discovered Parallel universe” has been the headlines that went viral on May 21, 2020 after some articles from NewYork post and Newscientist ended their story with a strong possibility for the Parallel universe. Later, these two popular sites were criticized for being irresponsible while reflecting scientists’ opinions. So what made these pages go wild over such topic? Before we get into this, let’s know about ANITA
ANITA
ANtarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna is used to extend NASA’s research into high energy particles and radiation. The module is connected to a balloon that hovers above the Antarctic ice sheet covering a range of about 1.5 million sq. Kilometer.
We are constantly getting cosmic ray showers from the outer space. These rays are of different energies depending on where they are from- stars, supernovae, galactic nucleus, or anything. Within these showers we also find electrons, protons, and Neutrinos. ANITA’s antenna points towards the earth to observe the radiowaves produced due to the Askaryan effect by the neutrinos when they strike the ice sheet.
You would have heard that Neutrinos rarely interact with the ordinary matter and so we set up observatories deep under the underground to observe these. But that is just the case with the low energy ones. ANITA is set up to observe high energy neutrinos that are traversing at an energy of 10^19eV and higher. These High Energy Neutrinos cannot travel far without interacting with ordinary matter. They are extremely rare with a square kilometer of earth hit by only a few dozens per century.
Since 2016, ANITA had flown a few times over the Antarctic. Their initially collected data seemed to be Noise but when analyzed later, one of those signals was weird. It showed radiowaves received at an angle for which the Neutrino should strike the ice from inside the earth instead of falling down from space.
Why not penetrate the planet?
One can think that Neutrinos would have entered the earth from the other side and showed up at the South pole. But as I said before, these are high energy neutrinos and they can’t travel through something as dense as earth. .
On the other hand, this is where IceCube Neutrino Observatory comes in. IceCube, unlike ANITA, is a structure standing on the ground with 5,160 optical detectors placed under the ice at 2500m depth. If these High energy neutrinos were to travel through the earth, they should have struck the Hydrogen & oxygen atoms in the ice. This would have produced signals that IceCube is capable of detecting. But we didn’t find any such data that correlates with the readings from ANITA. Since IceCube can detect signals with sensitivity way below the minimum energy limit of ANITA, the fact that it didn’t ring a bell, turns down the possibility for a penetration.
The chances that there had been an instrumental error is too less. This made the science community get excited about a possible new phenomenon waiting to be discovered. Our current Standard model doesn’t have a place for what we recorded with ANITA.
A research paper published on this data spoke about using this as evidence for CPT symmetric universe. In other words, there is a chance that this particle would have arrived from a parallel universe completely made of antimatter, where the time runs backward. If such a universe existed, it would have been made at the same time our universe was born out of big bang. Thus the production of two universes with one of them made of matter and another made of antimatter makes ‘something from nothing’ theory possible, as they’ll cancel each other.
Though this parallel universe theory has some possibility, it isn’t the only theory that validates such a phenomenon. There are some more ideas through which this could be possible. Even if other ideas were to fail, it is foolish to say that this event is enough to prove the existence of a parallel universe when a discovery requires much more reports pointing to the same thing. As a sci-fi fan, one should be careful while separating science from fiction, and that too from rumors, I hope I have made a good attempt.
I’m sorry, they’ll keep on calling so.
–Vivek Karunakaran
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