There Isn't A Parallel Universe, NASA Didn't Find Anything Like That

Last week, people around the world were astonished when several newspapers reported that NASA had found a parallel universe where time runs backward. This is not true.

The misleading articles circulating on the internet over the past days reported an experiment conducted in Antarctica detecting particles that break the laws of physics. All those articles pulled from a report on New Scientist published April 8 with the title “We may have spotted a parallel universe going backward in time.”

The report wrote about findings from the ANITA experiment (the Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna), maintained by NASA researchers. In this experiment, a helium balloon, attached with an array of radio antennas, flies over the Antarctic ice sheet at the 37km altitude, nearly four times the height of commercial flights. At 37 kilometers above the Earth's surface, the antennas can take in the sound of cosmos and detect neutrinos, the high-energy particles that constantly bombard Earth.

These particles are no harm, in fact, each second, there are about 100 trillion neutrinos passing through a human body per second. Neutrinos hardly interact with matter, but if they smash into an atom, they generate a batch of secondary particles that can be detected, allowing scientists to investigate where they come from.

So, ANITA detects neutrinos that ping from space and collide with matter in the Antarctic.

By far, ANITA has detected a few anomalous events. The neutrinos, rather than streaming from space, appear to come from a strange angle, through the interior of Earth then hit the detector. These events are inexplicable with the current understanding of physics. CSIRO honorary fellow Ron Ekers said:

“The unusual ANITA events have been known and discussed since 2016. 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.”

While the ANITA results came out nearly two years ago, the report by New Scientist was just filed on April 8 and the theory caught fire. The results have made headlines on social media with titles claiming scientists have found a parallel universe.

However, ANITA principal investigator Peter Gorham pointed out that journalism “just made some things up about myself and our experiment.”

Since the report by New Scientist is behind a paywall, many claimed the discovery of a parallel universe just based on the opening paragraph on, leaving out the full explanation where a scientist in this experiment admits the parallel universe theory has one or two loose ends.

There’s another neutrino observatory called IceCube, at the South Pole that’s been following up on the observations of ANITA. It suggests that the strange events can’t be explained by the standard model of physics. Ekers said:

“In such a situation you start exploring even more extreme possibilities.”

However, that doesn’t mean there’s a parallel universe. Next time when you see a shocking piece of news, maybe fact-check it carefully before spreading all over the internet.

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