In a discovery which has been described as capturing the imaginations of physicists around the world, it seems that scientists working in Antarctica over the last few years have found evidence of particles which appear to not fit in with the standard model of physics.
These particles were observed twice on a series of flights between 2006 and 2017 by Peter Gorham, a professor of physics at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and a team of researchers.
A discovery made by researches in Antarctica in 2016 could point to the existence of a parallel universe where time operates in reverse.
The baffling discovery was made using NASA’s Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA), which uses a giant balloon to carry 48 antennas across a million square kilometres. The ANITA searches for elusive particles named neutrinos which are tiny, high energy particles arriving from space, capable of travelling at the speed of light.
Speaking with University of Hawai’i News back in 2017, Gorham described: “Antarctica has several properties that make it really ideal for what we want to do, and ice has an amazing property in Antarctica of being almost completely clear to radio waves, that, if you flew over Antarctica with radio eyes, you could see right through the ice several miles deep into it and see the subcontinent below.”
Yet instead of the particles they were looking for, the scientists discovered something they believed to be entirely impossible. In 2018, it emerged that for the second time, researchers had discovered a radio burst from an upside-down cosmic ray shower, using ANITA. Rather than coming down to Earth from space, these particles seemed to explode out of the ground.
Gorham described of the discovery: “What we saw is something that looked just like a cosmic ray, as seen in reflection off the ice sheet, but it wasn’t reflected, it was as if the cosmic ray had come out of the ice itself. A very strange thing. So we published a paper on that, we just suggested that this was in pretty strong tension with the standard model of physics.”
In fact, according to Gorham, the discovery may signal an indication of an entirely new type of physics, something beyond the current standard model.
The discovery, which was initially made in 2016, has attracted many scientific theories in order to explain its occurrence, however, most of them have been ruled out. Recently, however, New Scientist reported that perhaps the only way to explain the discovery was the existence of a parallel universe which was going backwards in time, created by the Big Bang.
“Explaining this signal requires the existence of a topsy-turvy universe created in the same big bang as our own and existing in parallel with it,” New Scientist describes. “In this mirror world, positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards. It is perhaps the most mind-melting idea ever to have emerged from the Antarctic ice – but it might just be true.”
Whilst, of course, it’s just a theory, it’s definitely some mind-bending stuff and would have some pretty massive implications if true.
Check out a video on the discovery below.
