Physicists suggest an invisible “mirror universe”

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Technology Innovation Website Editor – 05/20/2020

Transforming theories into reality

Physicists propose adopting a model of the universe in which there is an invisible “mirror world” of particles that interact with our world only through the force of gravity.

According to Francis Sayer Racine and colleagues, this may be a good solution to a great mystery in modern cosmology – Hubble’s persistent problem.

The Hubble constant shows the speed at which the universe is currently expanding. The problem is that predictions for this expansion rate, taken from the Standard Model of cosmology, are much slower than the rate found by our more accurate measurements. In addition, the measurements also do not match, with “uneven fixedDepending on the technology used.

This contradiction One of many that cosmologists have tried to solve Changing our current cosmological model. The challenge is to do this without destroying the agreement that exists between the Standard Model predictions and many other cosmic phenomena, most notably the cosmic microwave background.

mirror universe

In order not to have to destroy the already finished building, astrophysicists are trying to find a way out of the equations that describe the most accepted model today.

By doing so, Cyr-Racine and his colleagues discovered a mathematical property of the cosmic model that no one had yet realized. This property could, in principle, allow for a faster rate of expansion of the universe by forcing only minor changes to the other predictions of the model, thus avoiding conflicting — or at least, big — with the observations.

Specifically, the trio finds that adopting a uniform measure of gravitational free-fall rates and photon-electron scattering rates leaves most dimensionless cosmological observations roughly constant.

“Essentially, we are pointing out that many of the observations we make in cosmology have an inherent symmetry in the measurement of the universe as a whole. This may provide a way to understand why there is a discrepancy between different measurements of the expansion rate of the universe,” explained Sir Racine.

If the universe somehow obeys this new symmetry, then the equations lead to a very interesting picture of reality: that, in the mirror of this symmetry, there is another world – a mirror universe – very similar to ours, but invisible to us, except for the effect of gravity on ours.

mirror of problems

The mirror universe would be more of an inexplicable element, but physicists are already accustomed to “dark strip“Explanation is needed, as dark energy and dark matter resist all observation attempts, making the ‘dark universe’ very difficult to swallow. With the advantage that this mirror world would allow for an efficient gradient of gravitational free-fall rates, respecting the average density of accurately measured photons today. .

“In practice, this size symmetry can only be achieved by including the mirror world in the model – a parallel universe with new particles that are all copies of known particles. The idea of ​​a mirror world first appeared in the 1990s, but was not previously recognized as a potential solution to a problem Hubble constant.

“This might sound crazy, but These mirror worlds have a great literature on physics In a completely different context, where they can help solve important problems in particle physics. And our work allows us, for the first time, to relate this huge literature to an important problem in cosmology,” explained Sir Racine.

Of course, in the meantime, the discrepancy between different approaches to measuring the Hubble constant may have been eliminated — finding errors in some measurements, for example — making this proposed mirror universe unnecessary.

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