For some years now, newspaper headlines have been claiming that NASA has discovered a parallel universe – a hidden cosmos, so to speak. Of course, news like this doesn’t go unnoticed, so several theories have already been circulating on social media: how do the laws of physics work there?; is it true that time runs backwards in this parallel universe?; how did scientists manage to discover this? These were just some of the questions the public has asked, but what could be behind this hidden cosmos?
How did this hidden cosmos news start?
Well, to understand this story better, we need to go back to 2020, when NASA launched the ANITA (Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna) experiment. This experiment was basically a detector suspended by giant balloons, which hovered over Antarctica to capture neutrino signals, which, in less scientific terms, are subatomic particles with almost no mass and that barely interact with matter.
While the experiment was running, ANITA detected unusual signals. Why were they unusual? These signals indicated that particles seemed to be emerging from within the Earth, going in the opposite direction to what was expected, quite different from what we are used to analyzing. In addition, it was even stranger because this type of extremely high-energy particle is normally blocked when trying to cross the planet. In other words, it would be “normal” to detect them coming from space, and not from below.
Like all types of discovery, it was published in scientific channels, and of course,e something as strange as this would start to generate the most diverse hypotheses. The one that caught the most attention was a model called the CPT symmetric universe. In other words, it claimed that the universe before the Big Bang was an inverted mirror of ours, so particles, energy, and time would always be backwards.
That was enough for several media outlets, such as New Scientist, to start speculating that we might be seeing signs of a parallel universe – imagine how crazy that is. And even though the article used only hypothetical language, full of “what ifs”, the internet turned speculation into certainty, so websites started to claim: “NASA discovered a hidden cosmos”.
Okay, but what does NASA say?
It is important to clarify that, at no time, did NASA claim that it had found a hidden cosmos or a parallel universe in which time runs backwards (let’s remember that what we already know is that our Universe is running out of time, and we may even have reached our end date).
The NASA researcher who analyzed the ANITA data, Alex Pizzuto, posted on his social media that there were simpler explanations that did not involve exotic theories. As much as discoveries like this shock us, and a lot, the scientific community is already used to dealing with this news. That is why they already have in mind that every discovery needs to be replicated, verified, and interpreted very carefully – otherwise, everything turns into pandemonium.
Why do parallel universes keep coming back to the surface?
Let’s be honest: who here wouldn’t be excited about discovering a hidden cosmos and, even better, a parallel universe? That’s the main reason this topic keeps coming up. We’ve had this concept applied in comics, movies, series, and even video games for a long time, so it’s like a dream come true.
We need to keep in mind that finding a new universe is much more complicated than it seems; it takes time, patience, study, and lots and lots of analysis. It’s no coincidence that NASA is now more focused on studying ours in more depth, and I’m sorry to say, but a recent discovery isn’t very encouraging: studying the most worrying theory, NASA sees the end of the universe, frozen and without light.
