A scientist at the University of Portsmouth claims to have ‘evidence’ that humanity exists with a simulation. In the 1999 movie The Matrix, the plot centers around the fact that we live in a digital simulation, and scientist Melvin Vopson claims that fact may match the fiction of the popular blockbuster.

Vopson has written extensively on the topic of the possibility that the known universe is a digital facsimile. He has provided articles for The Conversation and authored a book, Reality Reloaded, on the theme.

But while many of the theories posited about the universe being a simulation are in the realm of the abstract, Vopson now claims to have evidence that support his theory. “In physics, there are laws that govern everything that happens in the universe, for example how objects move, how energy flows, and so on. Everything is based on the laws of physics,” the scientist said in 2022, reports Popular Mechanics.

More than 97% of the stars in our Galaxy will end their lives with a whimper—slowly cooling as stellar remnants known as white dwarfs. The cooling of white dwarfs follows a pattern that was thought to be so predictable that the temperatures of white dwarfs are used to determine the age of surrounding stars. New findings, however, indicate this pattern may need revision [1]. Predictions made by Antoine Bédard of the University of Warwick, UK, and his colleagues now indicate that some white dwarfs may undergo a process that “reinvigorates” the stars, significantly slowing down the cooling process. That change could alter the calculated ages of white dwarfs by billions of years.

When a small star (one with a mass 8 times or less that of the Sun) runs out of nuclear fuel, it sheds its outer layers to form a planetary nebula. The core of the star then collapses into a white dwarf. Producing no heat, white dwarfs spend their existences radiating their remaining energy into space, cooling and solidifying from the inside out. Or so astrophysicists thought.

In 2019, this model was disrupted by astronomers analyzing data from the European Space Agency’s Gaia mission. The researchers identified a previously unknown population of white dwarfs within the Milky Way with anomalous properties [2]. As stars age, their velocities increase with respect to nearby stars because of repeated gravitational interactions with those stars. The newly identified white dwarfs, dubbed the Q branch, have much higher average velocities than models indicate they should have based on their temperatures, a finding that suggests that the Q-branch white dwarfs are older than previously thought. Some process is slowing down the cooling.