Things happen at a glacial pace in Antarctica. Just ask Peter Gorham. For a month at a time, he and his colleagues float a giant balloon loaded with a collection of antennas above the ice, traversing more than a million square kilometers of frozen terrain in search of evidence of high-energy particles arriving from space. I watched it scan.
When the experimental aircraft returned to the ground after its first flight, it showed nothing of itself, except for the odd flash of ambient noise. The same situation occurred after the second flight over a year later.
During the balloon's third flight, the researchers decided to revisit past data, especially signals that had been ignored as noise. It was lucky that they did. Upon closer inspection, one signal appeared to be a signature of a high-energy particle. But that wasn't what they were looking for. Plus, it seemed impossible. These particles did not fall from above, but were ejected from the ground in an explosive manner.
This strange discovery was made in 2016. Since then, all kinds of proposals rooted in known physics have been put forward to explain this complex signal, but all have been ruled out. What is left behind is shocking in its implications. To explain this signal, we need the existence of a dizzying universe that was created in the same Big Bang as ours and exists in parallel. In this mirror world, plus is minus, left is right, and time goes backwards. This is probably the most heart-melting idea ever to come out of Antarctic ice, and it just might be true.
My ambition is…
Source: www.newscientist.com
