{"id":7639,"date":"2016-07-24T08:40:44","date_gmt":"2016-07-24T15:40:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/BigJimIndustries.com\/wordpress\/?p=7639"},"modified":"2016-08-09T08:57:09","modified_gmt":"2016-08-09T15:57:09","slug":"7639","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/2016\/07\/24\/7639\/","title":{"rendered":"&#8220;A blob of light that\u2019s about 4,500 times brighter than it should be&#8230;&#8221;"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/the-scientist-who-thinks-he-found-proof-of-a-parallel-dimension\" target=\"_blank\"><em>from Atlas Obscura<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n<h1>The Scientist Who Thinks He Found Proof of a Parallel Dimension<\/h1>\n<h2 class=\"subtitle subtitle-lg item-subtitle\">Not sci-fi, just science.<\/h2>\n<p><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/assets.atlasobscura.com\/article_images\/31445\/image.jpg\" width=\"480\" \/><em>Mapping\u00a0cosmic radiation: the different colors indicate\u00a03.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations. (Photo:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Ilc_9yr_moll4096.png\" target=\"_blank\">NASA\/WMAP Science Team\/Public Domain<\/a>)<\/em><\/p>\n<p>Parallel universes have long been a staple of superhero comic books, where they usually go hand-in-hand with stories about bizarro worlds just like ours, gone terribly wrong.<\/p>\n<p>But despite their place in science fiction, scientists have taken the idea of parallel universes seriously for quite awhile now. And a mysterious blob discovered in 2015, in a map of our own universe\u2019s glow, might actually be a cosmic bruise\u2014a sign that our universe has collided with another one.<\/p>\n<p>How does this work? First, you need to understand the cosmic microwave background, or CMB\u2014the oldest light in the cosmos. Essentially, it\u2019s a steady, persistent background radiation filling the universe, left over from the Big Bang. (It\u2019s believed to be the vestigial result of recombination, the moment when neutrons and electrons first combined to create hydrogen.)<\/p>\n<p>After\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/arxiv.org\/pdf\/1510.00126v1.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">mapping and analyzing the CMB<\/a>\u00a0using data from the European Space Agency\u2019s Planck telescope, Ranga-Ram Chary, a cosmologist at the California Institute of Technology, thinks that he\u2019s spotted a telling inconsistency in the pattern: a blob of light that\u2019s about 4,500 times brighter than it should be, based on our existing understanding of the early universe. As\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2015-11-cosmologist-strange-evidence-parallel-universe.html\" target=\"_blank\"><em>Phys.org<\/em>\u00a0explains it<\/a>, the blob\u2019s signature is \u201cmore consistent with a universe whose ratio of matter particles to photons is about 65x greater than our own.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>[ <a href=\"http:\/\/www.atlasobscura.com\/articles\/the-scientist-who-thinks-he-found-proof-of-a-parallel-dimension\" target=\"_blank\">click to continue reading at AtlasObscura.com<\/a> ]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>from Atlas Obscura The Scientist Who Thinks He Found Proof of a Parallel Dimension Not sci-fi, just science. Mapping\u00a0cosmic radiation: the different colors indicate\u00a03.77 billion year old temperature fluctuations. (Photo:\u00a0NASA\/WMAP Science Team\/Public Domain) Parallel universes have long been a staple of superhero comic books, where they usually go hand-in-hand with stories about bizarro worlds just [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7639","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-weirdness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7639"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7639\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7639"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7639"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bigjimindustries.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7639"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}