A Physicist Has Suggested That There Is An Anti-Universe Running Backward In Time, Which Could Explain Where All The Antimatter Went
A physicist has suggested that there is an anti-universe running backward in time, which could explain where all the antimatter went and why the expansion of the universe is accelerating. It might be tough to get behind the theory, but hear us out.
First of all, antimatter is made up of antiparticles. Each particle is believed to be associated with an antimatter companion with an opposite charge—one is positive, and the other is negative. When the two particles meet, they destroy one another.
With that in mind, one of the big questions regarding the concept of antimatter is how the universe still exists. In our universe, there is more matter than antimatter, but scientists can’t explain why or where all the antimatter went.
They expected equal amounts of both types of particles to be produced during the Big Bang, which would mean that the universe would destroy itself rather quickly—but it didn’t.
According to Naman Kumar, a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology, the universe was born with an anti-universe running backward in time. This view could clear up the mysteries about antimatter and throw light on dark energy.
Astronomers have figured out that the universe is expanding by measuring the distances of Cepheid variable stars. They also determined that around nine billion years after the Big Bang, the expansion appeared to be accelerating.
Dark energy is responsible for driving the accelerating expansion of the universe. Experts have very little understanding of the way it works.
One explanation for the presence of dark energy is that it’s driven by vacuum energy acting as a large-scale repulsive force to gravity, with particles and antiparticles blinking in and out of existence.
Other interpretations have involved cosmic strings, objects that formed in the early universe and are flaws in the fabric of spacetime. Or perhaps our understanding of the universe is completely off somehow. In Kumar’s work, there are two universes, and their expansion explains dark energy.
Eugenia – stock.adobe.com – illustrative purposes only
“If the universe exists as a universe/anti-universe pair, then it expands in an accelerated manner,” Kumar wrote in his paper. “The same reasoning can be extended to the anti-universe if we take it to be a half-space defined by region t < 0.”
The bounds of the universe/anti-universe pair would be where time equals zero, and the two universes would be disconnected. For anyone who doesn’t want their matter to be instantly obliterated, the anti-universe is closed off. The anti-universe also must be running back in time for the idea to work.
If this were all true, both universes would expand by themselves without the help of dark energy. It would explain what happened to all the antimatter—it is in another universe that we can’t access. Over time, more observations will determine if the theory can be supported.
The paper was published in Gravitation and Cosmology.
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