No one is entirely certain what it actually looks
like, but some scientists are pretty convinced there's a mirror world affecting
gravity in our current universe.
Three researchers published their findings in the journal Physical Review Letters and say their hypothesis is based on
problems with the Hubble Constant, the rate at which the universe expands. SciTechDaily report on the study says predictions for that constant
are a lot slower than what we've measured in reality, and scientists are trying
to figure out what's causing the discrepancy. They say the cause could be a
mirror world we can't yet see.
"This might provide a way to understand why
there appears to be a discrepancy between different measurements of the
Universe’s expansion rate," researchers said in a statement about their
findings.
Somewhere Out There
Scientists have long built models of the cosmos. Now
the task is to create one that doesn't violate any of the rules cosmological rules
we've learned so far. The researchers say that if the universe is somehow
exploiting what we know about its physics and symmetry there could be an
invisible mirror world very similar to ours but invisible except through
gravitational impact on our world.
"This might seem crazy at face value, but such
mirror worlds have a large physics literature," study co-author
Francis-Yan Cyr-Racine said in the statement. "Our work allows us to link,
for the first time, this large literature to an important problem in cosmology."
Given that some believe the universe is a neural
network itself, and that there could even be two realities interacting with
each other, it's not exactly the wildest theory we've heard — but we still want
to see it for ourselves.