Scientists tout "first proof" hinting at a parallel universe

Hints of a mirror cosmos have a way of gripping the imagination, and recent chatter about “first proof” of a parallel universe has pushed that fascination back into the spotlight. Behind the viral headlines, though, the real story is less about a discovered twin reality and more about how modern physics, old philosophical ideas, and internet culture collide when scientists interpret strange data.

As I trace the claims and the corrections, what emerges is not a clean confirmation of another universe but a revealing snapshot of how bold theories are tested, misread and sometimes wildly oversold long before the math or the measurements are settled.
How a speculative idea turned into “first proof” hype

The notion that our cosmos might be just one of many has deep roots, long predating the latest social media storm about a supposed parallel universe. Long before particle detectors and space telescopes, thinkers were already toying with the possibility of multiple worlds, and that history matters when I weigh modern claims of “first proof” because it shows how persistent and slippery the idea has always been. When a new experiment is framed as finally validating that vision, I see it as the latest chapter in a story that began centuries ago rather than a sudden scientific revolution.

READ MORE...

The Ultimate Cosmic Law and the Mysteries of Light Speed Limit

What if I told you that the speed of light is not just a number, but a cosmic rule that governs everything in our universe? Often represented by the symbol "c", it measures approximately 299,792 kilometers per second (186,282 miles per second) in a vacuum. This extraordinary constant influences the tiniest particles to the grandest galaxies. But how did we arrive at this understanding, and why can nothing exceed this speed limit? Join me as we explore the fascinating journey of light speed, its implications, and the ongoing mysteries it presents.

The Historical Journey of Light Speed
The quest to understand how fast light travels has intrigued humankind for centuries. Ancient Greek philosophers like Empedocles and Plato speculated on the nature of light, but serious scientific investigation only began in the 17th century.

Danish astronomer Ole Rømer made a groundbreaking discovery in 1676 while observing Jupiter's moon Io. He noticed that the time between Io's eclipses varied with Earth’s distance from Jupiter, leading him to estimate that light takes about 22 minutes to cross a distance equal to the diameter of Earth's orbit. Though his figure of about 220,000 kilometers per second was not exact, it confirmed that light has a finite speed.

READ MORE...

James Webb telescope finds that galaxies in the early universe were much more chaotic than we thought

When the James Webb Space Telescope examined young galaxies with its Near Infrared Camera (NIRCam), it uncovered the messy early stages 

of formation in these distant objects. (Image credit: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, B. Robertson (UC Santa Cruz), B. Johnson (CfA), S. Tacchella 

(Cambridge), P. Cargile (CfA))

Like cosmic toddlers, galaxies in the young universe were messy and had difficulty settling down, a new study shows.

Using the powerful James Webb Space Telescope (JWST), scientists peered at more than 250 galaxies in the early universe. The research team charted the movement of gas long ago, when the universe was growing up — between 800 million and 1.5 billion years after the Big Bang. (The cosmos is roughly 13.8 billion years old.)

Their findings, published Tuesday (Oct. 21) in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, show that galaxies were restless in their youth.     

READ MORE...

Dark Matter and Dark Energy Don’t Exist, New Study Claims

A new study argues that dark matter and dark energy might be illusions caused by the universe’s forces fading over time.

For many years, scientists have thought that dark matter and dark energy make up most of the cosmos. A new study, however, challenges that long-held belief by proposing that these mysterious components might not exist at all. Instead, what appears to be dark matter and dark energy could actually result from the gradual weakening of the universe’s fundamental forces as it grows older.

The research, led by Rajendra Gupta, an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Physics at the University of Ottawa, suggests that if the core strengths of nature’s forces (like gravity) change slowly across time and space, they could account for the puzzling behaviors astronomers see—such as how galaxies rotate, evolve, and how the universe continues to expand.

READ MORE...

Researcher proposes first-time model that replaces dark energy and dark matter in explaining nature of the universe

Dr. Richard Lieu, a physics professor at The University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH), a part of The University of Alabama System, has published a paper in the journal Classical and Quantum Gravity that proposes a universe built on steps of multiple singularities rather than the Big Bang alone to account for the expansion of the cosmos.

The new model forgoes the need for either dark matter or dark energy as explanations for the universe's acceleration and how structures like galaxies are generated.

The researcher's work builds on an earlier model hypothesizing that gravity can exist without mass.

READ MORE...

"Hidden galaxies" discovery would upend our current understanding of the universe

A newly analyzed, deep-field universe photo, produced by stacking multiple infrared observations, points to elusive collections of dust-filled star systems. This intriguing view of ancient “hidden galaxies” could change how we understand the cosmos.

Researchers used cutting-edge imaging to map a far-infrared landscape brimming with nearly 2,000 galaxies.

Preliminary hints suggest there may be galaxies lurking just out of sight, influencing how energy is emitted across space.

Early calculations indicate that their collective light might explain the missing piece in the energy puzzle at long infrared wavelengths, an aspect that has puzzled astronomers for years.

READ MORE...

Dark Matter Does Not Exist

For centuries, scientists have grappled with the fundamental forces that govern our universe, chief among them being gravity, and more recently, dark matter.

Gravity is the invisible force that attracts objects with mass towards each other, playing a crucial role in shaping the cosmos, from the formation of galaxies to the orbits of planets.

However, as our understanding of the universe has expanded, so too have the mysteries surrounding it.

Dark matter dilemma
One of the most perplexing of these mysteries is the concept of dark matter, a hypothetical form of matter that is believed to make up a significant portion of the universe’s total mass.

Unlike ordinary matter, which we can see and interact with directly, dark matter does not emit, absorb, or reflect light, making it invisible to telescopes and other detecting instruments.  READ MORE...

NASA Launces Time Machine

The James Webb Space Telescope, also commonly called Webb, is the most significant advancement in human endeavor toward unraveling the mystery of the cosmos. This infrared observatory started in space with the support of NASA, ESA, and CSA; it can give a new perception of the evolution of the cosmos in the tendency to provide a glimpse of the Big Bang and its effect.

Webb is more than just a telescope – it is humanity’s most potent eye in the sky – providing the ability to observe the universe billions of years back and, hopefully, unlock the key to the cosmos’ evolution and provide answers to some of the most fundamental questions asked by humanity.

A mirror like no other: how Webb’s unprecedented design changes our understanding of the cosmos
Webb’s instrument, called the Mid-Infrared Instrument or MIRI, is designed to collect energy even from behind dust clouds and reveal the objects behind them. It has a mirror that is almost three times the size of the first space telescope, the Hubble, and is made of 18 hexagonal segments, collecting much more light than the earlier telescope, hence capturing the faint lights from the young universe.               READ MORE...

Scale Helps Understand Reality

Imagine setting off on a spacecraft that can travel at the speed of light. You won’t get far. Even making it to the other side of the Milky Way would take 100,000 years. It is another 2.5 million years to Andromeda, our nearest galactic neighbor. And there are some 2 trillion galaxies beyond that.

The vastness of the cosmos defies comprehension. And yet, at the fundamental level, it is made of tiny particles.”It is a bit of a foreign country – both the small and the very big,” says particle physicist Alan Barr at the University of Oxford. “I don’t think you ever really understand it, you just get used to it.”

Still, you need to have some grasp of scale to have any chance of
appreciating how reality works.        READ MORE...

A New Class of ExoPlanet

Artist's illustration of a half-rock, half-water world orbiting a red dwarf star. 

(Image credit: Pilar Montañés (@pilar.monro))

A new type of exoplanet — one made half of rock and half of water — has been discovered around the most common stars in the universe, which may have great consequences in the search for life in the cosmos, researchers say.


Red dwarfs are the most common type of star, making up more than 70% of the universe's stellar population. These stars are small and cold, typically about one-fifth as massive as the sun and up to 50 times dimmer.

The fact that red dwarfs are so very common has made scientists wonder if they might be the best chance for discovering planets that can possess life as we know it on Earth. For example, in 2020, astronomers that discovered Gliese 887, the brightest red dwarf in our sky at visible wavelengths of light, may host a planet within its habitable zone, where surface temperatures are suitable to host liquid water.

However, whether the worlds orbiting red dwarfs are potentially habitable remains unclear, in part because of the lack of understanding that researchers have about these worlds' composition. Previous research suggested that small exoplanets — ones less than four times Earth's diameter — orbiting sun-like stars are generally either rocky or gassy, possessing either a thin or thick atmosphere of hydrogen and helium.


In the new study, astrophysicists sought to examine the compositions of exoplanets around red dwarfs. 

They focused on small worlds found around closer — and thus brighter and easier to inspect — red dwarfs observed by NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS).  READ MORE...

Backwards in Time

A wild new theory suggests there may be another "anti-universe," running backward in time prior to the Big Bang.  The idea assumes that the early universe was small, hot and dense — and so uniform that time looks symmetric going backward and forward.

If true, the new theory means that dark matter isn't so mysterious; it's just a new flavor of a ghostly particle called a neutrino that can only exist in this kind of universe. And the theory implies there would be no need for a period of "inflation" that rapidly expanded the size of the young cosmos soon after the Big Bang.

If true, then future experiments to hunt for gravitational waves, or to pin down the mass of neutrinos, could answer once and for all whether this mirror anti-universe exists.

Preserving symmetry
Physicists have identified a set of fundamental symmetries in nature. The three most important symmetries are: charge (if you flip the charges of all the particles involved in an interaction to their opposite charge, you'll get the same interaction); parity (if you look at the mirror image of an interaction, you get the same result); and time (if you run an interaction backward in time, it looks the same).

Physical interactions obey most of these symmetries most of the time, which means that there are sometimes violations. But physicists have never observed a violation of a combination of all three symmetries at the same time. If you take every single interaction observed in nature and flip the charges, take the mirror image, and run it backward in time, those interactions behave exactly the same.

This fundamental symmetry is given a name: CPT symmetry, for charge (C), parity (P) and time (T).

In a new paper recently accepted for publication in the journal Annals of Physics, scientists propose extending this combined symmetry. Usually this symmetry only applies to interactions — the forces and fields that make up the physics of the cosmos. But perhaps, if this is such an incredibly important symmetry, it applies to the whole entire universe itself. In other words, this idea extends this symmetry from applying to just the "actors" of the universe (forces and fields) to the "stage" itself, the entire physical object of the universe.

Creating dark matter
We live in an expanding universe. This universe is filled with lots of particles doing lots of interesting things, and the evolution of the universe moves forward in time. If we extend the concept of CPT symmetry to our entire cosmos, then our view of the universe can't be the entire picture.

Instead, there must be more. To preserve the CPT symmetry throughout the cosmos, there must be a mirror-image cosmos that balances out our own. This cosmos would have all opposite charges than we have, be flipped in the mirror, and run backward in time. Our universe is just one of a twin. Taken together, the two universes obey CPT symmetry.

The study researchers next asked what the consequences of such a universe would be.  They found many wonderful things.  READ MORE...

Universe Expanding Faster Than Expected

This image from the Hubble Space Telescope features the spiral galaxy Markarian 1337, which is roughly 120 million light-years away from Earth. In 2006, astronomers saw a certain kind of supernova explode in this galaxy, providing researchers with some of the data nee...IMAGE BY ESA/HUBBLE & NASA, A. RIESS ET AL.

The latest measurements with the Hubble Space Telescope suggest the universe is expanding faster than scientists' models predict—a hint that some unknown ingredient could be at work in the cosmos.

It’s one of the biggest puzzles in modern astronomy: Based on multiple observations of stars and galaxies, the universe seems to be flying apart faster than our best models of the cosmos predict it should. Evidence of this conundrum has been accumulating for years, causing some researchers to call it a looming crisis in cosmology.

Now a group of researchers using the Hubble Space Telescope has compiled a massive new dataset, and they’ve found a-million-to-one odds that the discrepancy is a statistical fluke. In other words, it’s looking even more likely that there’s some fundamental ingredient of the cosmos—or some unexpected effect of the known ingredients—that astronomers have yet to pin down.

“The universe seems to throw a lot of surprises at us, and that’s a good thing, because it helps us learn,” says Adam Riess, an astronomer at Johns Hopkins University who led the latest effort to test the anomaly.

The conundrum is known as the Hubble tension, after astronomer Edwin Hubble. In 1929 he observed that the farther a galaxy is from us, the faster it recedes—an observation that helped pave the way toward our current notion of the universe starting with the big bang and expanding ever since.

Researchers have tried to measure the universe’s current rate of expansion in two primary ways: by measuring distances to nearby stars, and by mapping a faint glow dating back to the infant universe. These dual approaches provide a way to test our understanding of the universe across more than 13 billion years of cosmic history. The research has also uncovered some key cosmic ingredients, such as “dark energy,” the mysterious force thought to be driving the universe’s accelerating expansion.

But these two methods disagree on the universe’s current expansion rate by about 8 percent. That difference might not sound like much, but if this discrepancy is real, it means the universe is now expanding faster than even dark energy can explain—implying some breakdown in our accounting of the cosmos.  READ MORE...