Weird ‘bruise’ in space could be from a collision with a parallel universe, scientist says

In sci fi, parallel universes are usually just like ours, but for some reason, Hitler won the war.

But could we be about to have our first encounter with a real one?

A report suggests claims that a weird ‘cold spot’ in ‘background’ radiation from space could be the sign our universe once collided with another – entirely different – universe.

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Writing for The Conversation, Ivan Baldry of Liverpool John Moore University says, ‘One of the more exotic explanations is that there was a collision between universes in a very early phase.’

The cold spot is seen in the cosmic microwave background (CMB), a relic of the Big Bang, covers the whole sky.

At a temperature of 2.73 degrees above absolute zero (or -270.43 degrees Celsius), the CMB has some anomalies, including the Cold Spot.

This feature, about 0.00015 degrees colder than its surroundings, was previously claimed to be caused by a huge void, billions of light years across, containing relatively few galaxies.

But research this year suggests that it’s not a void – which has led to speculation that it might be a ‘bruise’ from a collision with another universe.

Baldry writes, ‘The idea that we live in a ‘multiverse’ made up of an infinite number of parallel universes has long been considered a possibility.

‘But physicists still disagree about whether it could represent a physical reality or whether it’s just a mathematical quirk.

In their new work, the Durham team presented the results of a comprehensive survey of 7,000 galaxies – and found no evidence of a ‘supervoid’.

If there really is no supervoid that can explain the Cold Spot, simulations of the standard model of the universe give odds of 1 in 50 that the Cold Spot arose by chance.

But is that really evidence of an ancient collision between universes?

Baldry says the sheer size of the universe makes that unlikely.

Baldry writes, ‘From what we know about how the universe formed so far, it seems likely that it is much larger than what we can observe.

‘So even if there are parallel universes and we had collided with one of them – unlikely in itself – the chances that we’d be able to see it in the part of the universe that we happen to be able to observe on the sky are staggeringly small.
‘The paper also notes that a cold region of this size could occur by chance within our standard model of cosmology – with a 1%-2% likelihood.

‘While that does make it unlikely, too, it is based on a model that has been well tested so we cannot rule it out just yet.