It has definitely detected something unusual and unexpected. It looks for "ghostly" particles that pass through most matter. The ANITA experiment is mind-boggling in its own right. There is a really interesting science story here, but it's not the one you're being sold. "In such a situation you start exploring even more extreme possibilities," says Ekers. There's also another neutrino observatory at the South Pole, known as IceCube, which has been following up on the ANITA observations and suggests the standard model of physics cannot explain these strange events.
#PARALLEL UNIVERSE THEORY FULL#
Peter Gorham, the principal investigator on ANITA, says it's "some unfortunate tabloid journalism" and notes an early report by the Daily Star "just made some things up about myself and our experiment."īecause the New Scientist piece is behind a pay wall, many of the subsequent reports on the parallel universe are cribbed from the opening paragraphs and don't explain the full details behind the find, in which one of the scientists admits "there are one or two loose ends" for the parallel universe theory. Another says "Scientists may have just found evidence of a parallel universe." "NASA uncovers evidence of bizarre parallel universe where physics, time operate in reverse" reads one. Ever more urgent headlines have spurred its spread across social media. "After four years there has been no satisfactory explanation of the anomalous events seen by ANITA so this is very frustrating, especially to those involved."Īlthough the New Scientist report was filed on April 8 - and the ANITA results are almost two years old - the theory has only recently caught fire. "The unusual ANITA events have been known and discussed since 2016," says Ron Ekers, an honorary fellow at CSIRO, Australia's national science agency. These findings can't be explained by our current understanding of physics - that much is true. Instead of the high-energy neutrinos streaming in from space, they seem to have come from a strange angle, through the Earth's interior, before hitting the detector. Over the years, ANITA has detected a handful of "anomalous" events. ANITA detects neutrinos pinging in from space and colliding with matter in the Antarctic ice sheet. But if they do smash into an atom, they produce a shower of secondary particles we can detect, which allows us to probe where they came from in the universe. These particles pose no threat to us and pass through most solid objects without anyone even noticing - some estimates suggest 100 trillion neutrinos pass through your body every second! Rarely do they interact with matter.
At such a height, the antennas can "listen" to the cosmos and detect high-energy particles, known as neutrinos, which constantly bombard the planet. It involves an array of radio antennas attached to a helium balloon which flies over the Antarctic ice sheet at 37,000 meters, almost four times as high as a commercial flight. All the reports pull from the same source of information: A pay-walled report by New Scientist on April 8 titled "We may have spotted a parallel universe going backwards in time."Īt the center of the report are findings from the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna or ANITA, an experiment maintained by researchers at NASA. These mind-bending articles posit that an experiment in Antarctica detected particles that break the laws of physics. In the last few days a number of publications have suggested scientists "found evidence" for a parallel universe where time runs backward. Scientists haven't actually discovered a parallel universe, but you might think they have, based on multiple reports from across the web. Well, now more bad news: I'm here to spoil the parallel universe party. That means they're heading back to 2019, the good ol' days, right? In this mirror world, time runs backward. When will it end?īut the good news: Apparently, scientists have discovered a parallel universe, just like our own. Let's play a game of bad news, good news, bad news.īad news first: 2020.