X-Files: Cosmic 'Bruise' Could Be Evidence for Multiple Universes

[Introversion]

Okay, I'm going to use an "X-Files" prefix for posts about topics that seem, well, "a bit out there", especially with respect to being fact versus wild speculation. "The truth is out there!" Or not.

Here's another one...

Astronomers are on the hunt for proof of the multiverse.

It sounds wild. But the idea that we live in a multiverse — a cosmos where an infinite number of universes exist beside our own — is no longer confined to science fiction. It’s a respectable theory among scientists, so much so that some are on the hunt for proof of a nearby universe.

Now, scientists might be one step closer. A study recently submitted to “Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society” actually places the multiverse theory on firmer ground. Ruari Mackenzie, a graduate student at England’s University of Durham, took a deeper look at a region in the sky that’s so frigid and so large that most scientists don’t think it can be a statistical fluke. Instead, some astronomers think this so-called “cold spot” is an optical illusion produced by a lack of intervening galaxies. But Mackenzie and his colleagues found that those galaxies are no less dense than anywhere else in the universe, disproving that theory.

Believe it or not, the next reasonable explanation (so long as you don’t buy into the theory that it’s just a statistical fluke) is that the cold spot might be a bruise left after an ancient collision with another universe. There’s no proof — at least not yet. But a forthcoming map of the cold spot might let scientists nail down whether it is truly a footprint of another universe — a result that would turn our understanding of the universe on its head.

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[mccardey]

Oh great. You made me go and google multiverse and now I don't know who I even am any more. Totally going to be a theoretical physicist in the next life, but.

ETA: Or - yanno - the simultaneously current one.

 

[Albedo]

This has something to do with the Berensteain Bears, I think.

 

[dickson]

I dunno about the Berenstein Bears, but I finally made it through the paper (Rurai Mackenzie et al., arXiv submission 1704.03814). It is NOT easy reading, not least because the analysis is right at the bleeding edge of what the available statistics can support. To make short what is a long story, there is a region of the sky about (5 degrees)^2 in area, for which the cosmic microwave background shows a deficit of -150 microkelvins (out of 2.75 K). It is known as the Cold Spot among friends. The team of Mackenzie et al. did a survey of the frequency of galaxies as a function of redshift 0 <= z <= 0.4 in the Cold Spot, and in a different part of the sky, and found the distribution of galaxies in the Cold Spot to be statistically near-indistinguishable from the reference region. They model the expected effects on the CMB and argue that the similarity of Cold Spot and reference region implies that the Cold Spot deficit can't be due to an unusually large void in the galaxy distribution. The team offers the tentative conclusion that the Cold Spot may be of primordial origin. My favorite is the "bruise" hypothesis: In New Inflationary Cosmology, Universes like our own (and unlike it, too) nucleate out of a false vacuum. If two baby universes are a wee bit too close in the nursery, one or both of them may get a boo-boo. I'm looking forward to reading the papers that explain how that works...

It's an interesting paper-and should provoke a more intense study of the Cold Spot region. With luck, we should know for sure if the Cold Spot is in fact primordial in origin before long.

 

[Beanie5]

One of my random thoughts was the big bang might have been triggered by two universes zipping past each other at translight speed I wonder if thats an optionn ( not sure if trans light an option if the gravatational fields interact or if there are just some graviton stragglers)

 

[dickson]

If you had two universes zipping past each other would you really need a big bang?