Cosmic map reveals first evidence of other universes

SCIENTISTS believe they have found the first evidence that other universes exist.

The finding, based on data gathered by the European Space Agency’s Planck spacecraft, implies that our universe could be just one of billions — perhaps an infinite number.

Such theories have been discussed by cosmologists for decades — but until now they have lacked any evidence.

A few weeks ago, however, scientists published a spectacular new map of the cosmic microwave background — the “radiation” left behind after the Big Bang that created the universe 13.8bn years ago.

The map, based on Planck data, showed anomalies in the background radiation that, some cosmologists say, could only have been caused by the gravitational pull of other universes outside our own.

“These anomalies were caused by other universes pulling on our universe as it formed during the Big Bang,” said Laura Mersini-Houghton, a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

“They are the first hard evidence for the existence of other universes that we have seen.”

Such ideas are controversial but are attracting growing interest among physicists. This is because Mersini-Houghton, and her colleague Professor Richard Holman, at Carnegie Mellon University, published a series of papers from 2005 predicting what Planck would see.

In particular, they predicted that the ancient radiation permeating our universe would show anomalies generated by the pull from other universes.

The scientists analysing the Planck data have now published a paper acknowledging the anomalies exist and cannot be explained by conventional means. “It may be that the statistical anomalies described in this paper are a hint of more profound physical phenomena that are yet to be revealed,” it said.

Planck worked by gathering radiation from when the universe was just 370,000 years old — still glowing from the Big Bang. It has been travelling across space for 13.8bn years and so is remarkably faint but still detectable. In theory, that radiation should vary a little on the scale of galaxies and clusters of galaxies, but at much larger scales it should be evenly distributed.

In practice, however, Planck’s data shows this is not the case. The radiation is stronger in one half of the sky than the other. There is also a large “cold” spot where the temperature is below average.

Mersini-Houghton will set out her findings in Britain, first at the How The Light Gets In festival in Hay-on-Wye, starting this week, and then at a cosmology conference in Oxford.

They are likely to provoke a powerful reaction from other academics, some of whom have spent decades working on alternative theories that will be scrapped if Mersini-Houghton and Holman are proven right.

Malcolm Perry, professor of theoretical physics at Cambridge, said the idea needed work but was “very exciting”. “It is exactly right to say that this could be the first evidence for other universes.”

George Efstathiou, professor of astrophysics at Cambridge, who co-authored the papers setting out the Planck findings, said the suggestion that the data offered evidence for other universes was speculative but “very interesting”.

He added: “Such ideas may sound wacky now, just like the Big Bang theory did three generations ago. But then we got evidence and now it has changed the whole way we think about the universe.”