Question: If dark matter exists does that mean that there could be a parallel universe next to our own?

Christina Pagel answered on 21 Jun 2013:

Hi Leo!

Those are slightly different questions! From looking at how quickly our universe is getting better, physicists know that there must be alot of stuff out there that we can’t see… and they’ve called it dark matter! No one really knows what dark matter but they know that’s there’s a lot of it! NASA reckons that everything we can see (starts, galaxies etc) only makes up 5% of the everything in the universe!

Parallel universes are a bit different – we don’t really know how a universe starts but there are lots of different theories around about it, which are different interpretations of the fundamental equations of quantum theory and relativity – and some of these think there are definitely parallel universes out there…. THe thing is, that all such theories say that we could never know about the other universes so I don’t think we’ll ever know for sure!