Fans of Stranger Things will be delighted to learn that a real Upside Down—a parallel universe to our very own—might be more than a fictional storyline.
According to New Scientist, "strange particles observed by an experiment in Antarctica could be evidence of an alternative reality where everything is upside down."
The research that the article points to kicked off back in 2016. Led by one Peter Gorham, a professor of Physics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, the study made use of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Antarctic Impulsive Transient Antenna (ANITA) to carry out a search for neutrinos, high energy particles coming from space (apparently, the region is the ideal place to look for those, as the ice is "almost completely clear to radio waves).
ANITA basically traversed all of Antarctica's frozen landscape while hitched to a giant balloon and, after two rounds, the team was about to give up until a review of the data collected until then shed light on a particular signal indicating the presence of a particle "exploding out of the ground."
Although not what they were originally looking for, the particles were an even rarer find, given their coming out of the ice as opposed to coming down from space to Earth.
Now, years after the data was analyzed, researchers argue that the inability to explain the discovery points to the potential presence of a parallel universe "created in the same Big Bang as our own and existing in parallel with it," reads the New Scientist. The newly discovered universe would supposedly be made up of antimatter and, as a direct mirror of our own world, everything on it would be the opposite of what we're accustomed to: positive is negative, left is right and time runs backwards.
Although Gorham told New Scientist that "we don't know how to present it yet but we've got something," we're of the opinion that anything is possible. Are you with us?
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