Clickbait? Sure, but maybe popular clickbait in academia:
Last spring, a report from the world’s largest neutrino telescope — a sprawling grid of detectors woven into Antarctica’s ice — coincided with a blaze of hyperbolic headlines. They teased the possibility of an anti-universe where, from our point of view, time runs backward and the Big Bang represents an end, not a beginning. While it’s too soon to start searching for our reverse-aging, other-handed doppelgängers, physicists are still wrestling with strange signals coming in from space that, to date, have defied easy explanation…
Some have proposed that the anomalies arose from radio waves bouncing through caverns or buried lakes in the ice. Other theorists proposed more exotic ideas, such as that the heavy, high-energy particles in line with ANITA’s data may describe one candidate for dark matter — the mysterious stuff that’s believed to make up 85 percent of the matter in the universe but has never been detected. Still others hypothesize that the exotic particles fit an existing theoretical model of a parallel universe — one that is symmetric to ours, but populated with antimatter and running backward.
Stephen Ornes, “Are strange space signals in Antarctica evidence of a parallel universe?” at Astronomy
Paper. (open access)
It’s almost irrelevant what is really going on. The parallel universe is somewhat like the multiverse or the advanced space aliens. People who have no other religion need them to exist. And the outcome somehow makes it way into a science journal.