"WE NEED A PARTNER ANTI-UNIVERSE WHOSE TIME FLOW IS OPPOSITELY RELATED TO OUR UNIVERSE."
The current model scientists use to explain the universe
around us is made up of three components: regular matter, cold dark matter
(CDM), and the cosmological constant, or lambda, a coefficient first introduced
by Albert Einstein in 1917 that's related to dark energy.
This standard model of cosmology has served as a way to
explain how dark energy causes our universe to expand at an accelerating rate.
But while the model has been around for decades, mysteries remain. For one, we
have yet to observe dark matter directly. And the exact nature of dark energy,
which is estimated to make up 68 percent of the universe, has also proven
controversial, with many scientists coming forward with alternate explanations.
Now, a PhD student at the Indian Institute of Technology,
Gandhinagar named Naman Kumar has proposed a "new model" that does
away with this uncertainty by throwing out dark energy from the equation
altogether — which has a highly unusual implication.
"However, there is a price to pay," he wrote in a
statement accompanying a paper he recently published in the journal Gravitation
and Cosmology. "We need a partner anti-universe whose time flow is
oppositely related to our universe."
Dark Mirror
Kumar isn't the first to suggest our universe has a mirrored
twin that flows backwards in time. In February, an international team of
researchers similarly suggested that dark matter, the mysterious stuff that
makes up around 27 percent of the universe, resides in a mirror universe in
which atoms never formed.
Of course, Kumar's finding isn't anything more than a
working hypothesis regarding the observed accelerated expansion of the
universe, which is in his words "one of the greatest puzzles in our
understanding of the cosmos."
But as our methods to observe and study the universe
improve, astronomers are ever-so-slowly inching towards a possible explanation
for this discrepancy — and sometimes, a solution as elegant as an upside-down
world where time flows backwards, is our best bet.
"The beauty of this idea lies in its simplicity and
naturalness, setting it apart from existing explanations," Kumar argued.