One new theory, says physicist Michio Kaku, is that the as yet undetected dark matter of the universe may be ordinary matter that makes up stars, planets and galaxies in a parallel universe. “If a galaxy is hovering above in another dimension,’ says Kaku, “we would not be able to see it. It would be invisible, yet we would feel its gravity. Hence, it might explain dark matter.”
“I believe we exist in a multiverse of universes,” says theoretical physicist, Michio Kaku,“ underscoring the intriguing debate over the past decade among some the planet’s leading cosmologists and physicists, including 2020 Nobel-Prize laureate, Roger Penrose, about signs that a prior universe that may exist in the ancient afterglow from the Big Bang.
“If space is truly infinite,” observes Dan Hooper, head of the Theoretical Astrophysics Group at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in At the Edge of Time, “the implications are staggering. Within an infinite expanse of space, it would be hard to see any reason why there would not be an infinite number of galaxies, stars, and planets, and even an infinite number of intelligent or conscious beings, scattered throughout this limitless volume. That is the thing about infinity: it takes things that are otherwise very unlikely and makes them all inevitable.”
“You know, our sun looks just like thousands of other stars in the sky. You’d never guess that there are planets going around it, and that one of those planets has people who consider themselves very intelligent. There would be no way of knowing that,” said Cornell University icon, astronomer Carl Sagan, in a 1973 interview with Rolling Stone, long before Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz announced the first discovery of a planet outside our solar system, an exoplanet, orbiting a solar-type star in our home galaxy, the Milky Way in 1995. The planet, 51 Pegasi b, a gaseous ball comparable with the solar system’s biggest gas giant, Jupiter was detected at the Haute-Provence Observatory in southern France, using custom-made instruments.
“Hubble simply doesn’t go far enough into the infrared” to see the hidden galaxies of the early universe, said Rogier Windhorst of Arizona State University, co-author of a new study using the near-infrared capabilities of NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to probe known quasars, ‘quasi-stellar radio sources’, in hopes of spotting the surrounding glow of their host galaxies, without significant detections, suggesting that cocoons of dust that absorb visible light within the galaxies is obscuring the light of their stars.
This past February, four distinguished astrophysicists —Jonathan Carroll-Nellenback, Adam Frank, Jason Wright, Caleb Scharf— suggested in new research that Earth may have remained unvisited by space-faring civilizations all the while existing in a galaxy of interstellar civilizations seeded by moving stars that spread alien life, offering a solution to the perplexing Fermi paradox. They concluded that a planet-hopping civilization could populate the Milky Way in as little as 650,000 years.
