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Space NASA Sci-Fi Science

Scientists Claim 'Cold Spot' In Space Could Offer Evidence of a Parallel Universe (inhabitat.com) 125

New submitter LCooke writes: A international research team led by the University of Durham thinks a mysterious cold spot in the universe could offer evidence of a parallel universe. The cold spot could have resulted after our universe collided with another. Physicist Tom Shanks said, [...] "the cold spot might be taken as the first evidence for the multiverse -- and billions of other universes may exist like our own." From the report via Inhabitat: "NASA first discovered the baffling cold spot in 2004. The cold spot is 1.8 billion light years across and, as you may have guessed, colder than what surrounds it in the universe. Scientists thought perhaps it was colder because it had 10,000 less galaxies than other regions of similar size. They even thought perhaps the cold spot was just a trick of the light. But now an international team of researchers think perhaps the cold spot could actually offer evidence for the concept of a multiverse. The Guardian explains an infinite number of universes make up a multiverse; each having its own reality different from ours. These scientists say they've ruled out the last-ditch optical illusion idea. Instead, they think our universe may have collided with another in what News.com.au described as something like a car crash; the impact could have pushed energy away from an area of space to result in the cold spot." The study has been published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.
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Scientists Claim 'Cold Spot' In Space Could Offer Evidence of a Parallel Universe

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  • they used the wrong kind of thermometer.
  • This makes me think of the eye's 'blind spot', which is actually where the nerves pass through the retina. Perhaps the cold spot is where energy passes through our universe into another, although that would suggest more energy is flowing from this one to that one.

    • This makes me think of the eye's 'blind spot',

      Strange . . . this makes me think of the universe's G-spot.

      Which, if it really is cold, would explain a lot of things that are wrong with the universe.

      . . . and makes it even more incredible that a bunch of geeky scientists were able to find it at all!

    • Or maybe the energy is flowing into the past, which we now see today as the cosmic background radiation, big bang, etc. Who knows - it's probably stranger than we can imagine at this point.
  • You mean the water on mario's feet he uses to accumulates enough speed to perform the parallel universe traveling?

  • It's just the Roseanne Barr black hole decloaking for her new show.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    you will inevitably get below average.

    The voids in space for galaxies are just places where there's less mass to form galaxies. Which then means there's more gravitational attraction where the galaxies are, which means stuff that is in that lower density region is pulled out making it more of a void.

    Likewise with telescopes, you can get a better optic by buying a bigger telescope then putting an off-axis stop which you can move about to find the bit where the larger lens or mirror is more perfectly the righ

  • Could it be that we're quibbling over semantics? Let's examine a word.

    What is "the universe"? What if it simply means "everything, everywhere, all the time". What magicians call "all that is, seen and unseen"?

    "Everything" is an all-inclusive infinitive. Logically nothing can not be included in everything.

    That leaves us with the scientific quest to explore everything, and thereby exclude nothing.

    Just a rambling muse before coffee...

  • by mark_reh ( 2015546 ) on Saturday May 20, 2017 @07:54AM (#54454385) Journal

    "alternative facts" come from...?

  • "Parallel universe" makes people think of the trope. [tvtropes.org]

    I think "perpendicular universe" would be better, and it's probably more accurate since parallel things don't intersect.

  • Given so-called parallel universes are in other planes of reality that we cannot ever travel to because we have no commonality of any spatial dimensions, how can a hypothesis that talks about a physical collision between the two universes, and even located at a particular geographical spot in ours, even make any sense?

    • we have no commonality of any spatial dimensions

      1. ... no commonality that we know of.
      2 ... any spatial dimensions that we know of.
      3. ... who says the rules of space-time are uniform even in our own universe?
      4. ... who says the collisions were collisions of matter? cf Matter-energy equivalence, etc.

      One thing we know for certain that that we don't know everything. also:

      even make any sense?

      Lots of things we now accept as nonsense used to be accepted facts. It "made sense" that heavier objects fell faster than lighter objects. It "made sense" that the earth was the ce

      • by JustNiz ( 692889 )

        "... that we know of"

        Once you start playing that word game, literally anything no matter how stupid becomes possible, so its pointless to even go down that road.

        • It's not a word game. You're the one playing word games by invoking the "once you start playing that word game" bullshit. That's just a cop-out for those who lack sufficient intellectual curiosity to ask "why?" For example, why does an "arrow of time" exist? It's not like it's required for the universe to exist - it may just be an artifact of our perceptions. Why can't all points in time exist simultaneously, the same as all points in space? Maybe entropy is also an artifact. We don't know, and unless we a
          • Like trying to travel to the horizon. You can see it right over there, but the more you move toward it, the further it travels away from you. I seems to me that the speed of light limit may be something similar to the horizon. It is there, but it isn't really a thing, but an illusion.
  • This is a highly speculative interpretation of existing data. Other speculative interpretations are possible. The scientific method would dictate proceeding by designing clever experiments whose outcomes could rule out various alternative interpretations. I'm not convinced this is possible here, and not persuaded that this is true science. Certainly it's not "evidence".

  • by 0111 1110 ( 518466 ) on Saturday May 20, 2017 @07:50PM (#54456943)

    The so called WMAP cold spot looks to just be some sort of data error [oup.com] and probably does not in fact exist [seeker.com]

    Too bad because the idea was seriously cool and would have been useful for science fiction.

  • "My momma always said, watch out for the cold wet spot, right after two galaxies bump into each other," says Tom Shanks, aspiring local physicist.

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