Sunday, September 6, 2009

Is the Void the signature of a parallel universe?

Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill thinks so and she has the evidence to support her theory.

Here's some highlights from a story on New Scientist.

IN AUGUST, radio astronomers announced that they had found an enormous hole in the universe. Nearly a billion light years across, the void lies in the constellation Eridanus and has far fewer stars, gas and galaxies than usual. It is bigger than anyone imagined possible and is beyond the present understanding of cosmology. What could cause such a gaping hole? One team of physicists has a breathtaking explanation: "It is the unmistakable imprint of another universe beyond the edge of our own," says Laura Mersini-Houghton of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

It is a staggering claim. If Mersini-Houghton's team is right, the giant void is the first experimental evidence for another universe. It would also vindicate string theory, our most promising understanding of how the universe works at its most fundamental level. And it would do away with the anthropic arguments that have plagued string theorists in recent years because they say we are the reason the cosmos is the way it is. The hole in the universe is a big deal.

The giant void first showed up in maps of the afterglow of the big bang. In 2004, NASA's WMAP satellite made the most detailed measurements to date of the temperature of the cosmic background radiation. This microwave radiation gains a small amount of energy when it passes through a region of space populated by matter, making it appear slightly warmer in that direction. In contrast, radiation passing through an empty void loses energy, and so it appears cooler.

The question is: where should we look for the imprint and what form might that imprint take? Because of the expansion of the universe, no light or signals can reach us from beyond the cosmic horizon, about 42 billion light years away. On a far smaller scale, the messy process of galaxy formation has effectively erased any trace of the early interaction between our universe and neighbouring ones. However, on scales comparable to the cosmic horizon itself, there ought to remain an imprint from the time closest to the beginning of inflation when there was an interaction. "In today's universe, it should manifest itself at a red shift of less than 1, corresponding to a time when the universe was about half its present age, says Mersini-Houghton."

Mersini-Houghton and Holton say their dynamical theory can describe the form of the imprint too. The vacuums of neighbouring patches effectively push on our universe, they say. According to relativity, such squeezing produces repulsive gravity. Where we can see the squeezing act - on scales comparable with the size of the universe - the repulsive gravity should dramatically thin out matter and make it harder for galaxies to form. "We predict the existence of a giant void about 500 million light years across," says Mersini-Houghton. By cosmology's standards this forecast ties in pretty well with astronomers' observations of a void 900 million light years across at a red shift of 1. "We are amazed that the void is there just as we predicted," she says.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg19626311.400-the-void-imprint-of-another-universe.html?page=2

It's also interesting that a recent Scientific American article said there is no dark/matter energy. They said we live in a Void.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=does-dark-energy-exist

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